Life is, indeed, a delicate balance. Our health, our strength, our emotions, our time, our resources, and especially our relationships, what a struggle to keep them balanced!
Among life’s great joys are those opportunities to see and experience the perfect balance; to eat a meal in which the blend of flavors is just right; to behold ballet dancers floating gracefully across the stage; to see a work of art that achieves just the right use of light and color.
Such experiences are moving and inspiring because they reveal the sublime beauty and harmony of being; that exquisitely delicate balance that so often feels elusive.
When I was a student rabbi in Westfield, a friend on the clergy council told me a story about a man who stood at the top of Niagara Falls and saw a rope stretched form one side to the other. As he watched, a man started to walk across the rope, pushing a wheelbarrow. The first man couldn’t believe his eyes. When the other arrived safely at his side, he said to him, “Wow! I didn’t think that was possible.” “Well,” said the other, “Do you think I can make it back across?” Yeah, I believe you can.” “Great,” said the other, “hop in the wheelbarrow!”
What would you say? Would you accept the invitation to jump into the wheelbarrow? The truth is, we don’t have a choice! We’re all inside that wheelbarrow, crossing the tightrope of life, our knuckles turning white, as we hold on for dear life. As Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav put it, “The whole world is a narrow bridge.” “And the key,” he said, “is not to be afraid.” I would add; the key is not to lose your balance!
This is no simple thing, especially because we are not in the wheelbarrow alone. Each of our actions affects the balance of the whole. We’re all in there together. And as such, we are responsible to and for each other. The Midrash compares humanity to a group of people sailing together in a boat. Suddenly one of the passengers starts drilling a hole under his seat. When the people object, he retorts, “What are you complaining about? After all, I’m drilling under my own seat.” (Vayikra Rabba 4:6)
All over the world today, people are drilling holes under their own seats, and our boat is taking on water, literally. Once it was possible for human beings to imagine that the earth was impervious to our influence. Today it is increasingly clear that our imbalances of consumption are threatening the balance of the entire planet.
The CFC’s I release in my home drill a hole in the ozone layer that protects your skin. The coal they burn near Beijing produces acid rain that falls on Korea and Japan, degrading their environment. The toxic wastes that leach from the industrialized animal farms in Arkansas show up in their neighbor’s drinking water.
Truth be told, we’ve known about the human impact on the environment for a long time. 1962 Rachel Carson exposed the hazards of pesticides, especially DDT, in a landmark book entitled, Silent Spring. She demonstrated how DDT “entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, causing cancer and genetic damage.” And most shockingly, she showed how DDT had contaminated the entire world food supply.
Fifteen years ago, in a book that now reads like prophecy, Al Gore warned us about the danger of treating the earth as a collection of “resources,” to be exploited at our will. “…we are in effect, a natural force just like the winds and the tides…, he wrote, and “we are threatening to push the earth out of balance.” (Earth in the Balance, p. 2)
Two summers ago in Israel at the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research in the Negev we saw satellite images of the earth taken over a period of decades. They reveal the undeniable facts of global warming. Deserts are expanding. The polar icecaps are melting. And a bitter irony dawned on me. If current trends continue, we will literally drown in the desert as the landmasses dry up and the seawaters rise. It’s not that there isn’t enough water it’s just in all the wrong places!
The Torah teaches that God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, “to till it and to tend it,” l’ovdah, u’l’shomrah, “to work it and preserve it.” Our role was a balanced one, entailing responsibilities of stewardship that we have abdicated in modern times. We are already paying a heavy price for this and the stakes are getting higher. We need to start guarding and protecting the garden of the earth before we work it and ourselves to death.
There is mountain of data that I could share with you about the environmental crises we have wrought. Virtually no corner of our planet is unscathed. So I urge you to learn more. If you haven’t seen the film, An Inconvenient Truth, I urge you to do so. I have only one significant disagreement with the film, and that is its title. The truth about our environment is not an inconvenience. It is an outrage and a scandal.
Recycle, reuse, and think about every product you consume. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with CFL’s, compact fluorescent lamps. They are readily available. Most importantly, multiply your personal acts of environmental responsibility by engaging in advocacy. Every time we go to Washington to lobby we learn how few people make their voices heard, and how powerful that makes those who do speak up.
My colleague Rabbi Michael Namath of the RAC likes to tell the story of a town located alongside a river. Now the townsfolk were truly good people and as such, they were greatly distressed to hear that someone had fallen into the river and needed to be rescued, right in the middle of their town. When it happened a second and third time, they became really concerned, and began posting guards who would be there to save people from the river. But the problem only seemed to get worse, and because these were truly good people, they added even more guards to the effort. Until one day a member of the community came to the town council with a suggestion. Instead of putting all of their efforts into fishing people out of the river, why not go upstream and find out why they were falling in, in the first place? Within weeks, the townsfolk had installed railings and fences along the dangerous places up river, and the problem was solved.
It is vital that we do everything we can to soften our personal footprints on the earth. But that is not enough to slow down the accelerating pace of global warming. We must deliver a message to all our representatives that we will be judging them by their actions on these issues. And we must make certain that the path to the White House in 2008 is green. We need a new energy policy that is focused on renewable resources that are non-polluting. And that means shifting budget priorities to ones that are truly pro-life!
Jewish tradition has a powerful set of metaphors for the challenges of thinking globally. It is the language of “tikkun,” “repair,” that was developed by the masters of the Kabbalah, in 13th century Spain.
Over the course of these holy days you’ll be hearing more about this important concept. Today I want to talk about its essence. At its core, the mystical idea of tikkun is about balance, about achieving harmony between the different forces and qualities in life.
For as pressing as the environmental crisis may be, it is downstream from the source of the problem. It is a symptom of larger issues of imbalance in our lives. This is the message of the Zohar, the bible of the Kabbalah.
At the beginning we humans lived in paradise, a garden where everything co-existed in perfect harmony. Quoting Genesis 2, the Zohar teaches: “A river flows from Eden to water the garden.”
From Eden, from the Source of Being there is an ever-flowing stream of energy that nourishes & sustains the world- the garden. And our role is to till and to tend the garden, to maintain its balance and our own! For we are not only caretakers of the garden, we are rooted in its soil. Its wellbeing and ours are intertwined, dependent upon the proper balance of nutrients, of qualities and attributes that flow from the Source of all being.
Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? A perfect symbiosis! So what went wrong? Who and what spoiled the perfect harmony and balance of the garden? We did!
According to the Zohar the sin of the Garden of Eden was not that Adam & Eve ate the fruit of knowledge. It’s that they ate of it exclusively, to the exclusion of the other fruits, all the other qualities needed for a healthy balanced life. The fruit of knowledge was so desirable, so enticing, that they overindulged. And so have we!
I understand that environmental paradigms can be divided into two groups, theories of scarcity and theories of abundance. The masters of the Zohar saw the world as a place of abundance. The river flows from Eden; in the present tense. It is ever flowing, always sufficient to nourish and sustain the garden… if! if the resources are properly distributed; if there is proper balance!
But there is not proper balance! Too few of us consume far too many of earth’s resources. And often we do so recklessly, at the expense of our health, our relationships, and our environment.
Take the example of food. All the food in the world comes from one source. Do you know what it is? The sun!
Plants transform the sun’s energy into nutrients through photosynthesis. We get our sustenance either by eating those plants, or by eating the milk & meat of animals that eat those plants.
So long as the sun burns bright, the source of our food is inexhaustible, an ever-flowing stream of energy! Scarcity or abundance is all a function of distribution – of balance and proper management. Yet hundreds of millions of people are hungry or starving in the world today. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving. Over 4 million people will die of hunger this year.
At the same time, two-thirds of Americans are overweight, half of them are obese, and far too many of them are children. Some of this is overindulgence. A significant factor is the poor quality of our food.
A few years ago, an independent filmmaker named Morgan Spurlock came across a story about two obese girls who were suing McDonald’s for making them fat. Intrigued by their story he set out to make a documentary about the health effects of eating fast-food, with himself as the guinea pig. A normally healthy man, he engaged several doctors to monitor his health while he proceeded to eat McDonald’s for three meals a day for thirty days. The results far exceeded all expectations. By the end Spurlock had sustained liver damage, stomach pains, significant weight gain, and depression.
Spurlock’s film, “Supersize Me!” is eye opening in particular because one-third of America’s children eat at a fast-food outlet every day.
This summer I read a book that changed the way I eat and think about food called, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It is a very serious, very important book written by Michael Pollan, a frequent columnist for the NY Times Magazine. Pollan investigates our food chain, tracing several types of American meals back to their sources in nature. What he discovered is that all aisles in the supermarket lead to the corn-belt. Corn is in almost everything we eat, from the obvious to additives, to the fact that most of the meat, poultry and even the fish we eat are now raised on corn. Yes, farm-raised fish are swimming stalks of corn!
Why so much corn? The turning point was after WW II when the government found itself with a surplus of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient for making explosives. It turned out to be an excellent fertilizer, providing the nitrogen that allowed hybrid corn to be grown denser and denser, year after year on the same soil. The result was massive quantities of cheap corn, and the rest is nothing but the logic of the market place. Cattle and chickens don’t naturally eat corn, and it actually makes them sick, but the price couldn’t be beat, especially when the animals could be raised in CAFO’s—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. They are exactly what they sound like, large pens that can be located anywhere, in which animals are fed a mixture of corn and antibiotics from a feeding trough.
So what’s bad about this picture? As Pollan documents in great detail, corn is a great American industrial success story. The problem is we eat too much of it, and too little else, for our health. Its imprint is on our waste-lines and more importantly, on our medical charts. As we have learned from the Zohar, it is not good to overindulge on the fruit of one tree in the garden.
Industrial agriculture leaves its imprint on the land, as well. Nature favors diversity. And mile after mile of hybrid corn grown in soil kept alive by fertilizers is unnatural and ecologically unsound as it depletes the earth and pollutes the water.
So too are CAFO’s an ecological disaster. Raising animals out of their natural element, on a diet unsuited to their digestive systems, living amid their own waste, was bound to create environmental and health problems like polluted water and air, toxic wastes, and a variety of pathogens.
And all this is the only the tip of the corn stalk! Take my word for it we would all be well served to know more.
Keeping kosher, Sarah and I already read labels in the supermarket. Now we read them differently so as to remove ourselves from the industrialized food chain, as much as possible. We buy as many natural unprocessed foods as we can, organic and locally grown if possible, in our quest for a diet that is balanced and healthy for us, and the planet. We never eat fast-food, and I urge you to consider doing likewise.
There are many levels of tikkun. It begins with our selves, our bodies and our souls, and continues out to our families, our communities, our people, our country, and the world, all of which are connected to each other.
The most important teaching of the Zohar is that all of creation is connected in one great chain of being. God is not some entity above and apart from the world. God is present in all things including you and me. This means we are extraordinarily powerful. Every action, every deed we do affects everything else. We can and we have made a terrible mess of the world. But as Rabbi Nachman taught, “if you believe that you can do damage, believe that you have the power to repair;” to effect tikkun. The Kabbalah teaches us that we have great responsibility. God and the world need us and no act is too small or too insignificant.
We are walking a very narrow bridge, we are all riding in that wheelbarrow, and we need strength and courage to keep our balance. But we can make it to the other side. We can repair the world!
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