Choose Life
Friday April 29, 2022
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
On Friday night at sundown, the Jews offer a blessing over a cup of wine, with which we declare the Sabbath day holy, beginning with the words Vayehi erev vayehi voker, yom hashishi. There was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
We return every week, at this hour, to the moment of perfection at the end of the Biblical story of Creation. Vay’chulu hashamyim v’ha-aretz v’chol tz’va-am. The heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. Oceans teeming with fish. Sky alive with birds. The deserts, the jungles, the forests, the mountains and the plains and all their inhabitants, all coexisting in a marvelous, shimmering tapestry of life on earth. That is the moment of perfection to which we return every week, as we welcome Shabbat.
A classic rabbinic commentary from late antiquity notices, however, that the grammar of the last day of creation, the sixth day, on which human beings are created, is ever so slightly different from the grammar of all the other days. The other days are yom echad. Yom sheni. Yom shlishi. One day. A second day. A third day. Only the day on which humans are created is yom hashishi. The sixth day. Why the difference? The ancient sage explains: The prefix “hah,” which usually means “the,” in this case is a question mark. As you may know, the Torah has no punctuation marks. No periods. No semi-colons. No question marks. The way that the Torah indicates a question is by adding the prefix “hah” before a statement. Yom Hashishi, according to this ancient midrash, is “the sixth day???” As a question.
What is the question born on the creation of the sixth day?
It is the unanswered question at the heart of human nature: how will the human being choose to live? Will this human being choose good or evil? Will the human being choose a life of ethics and responsibility? Or will the human being choose a life of destruction and disintegration? Of the entire creation, only the human being has free will, to choose the blessing or the curse. And the midrash concludes with God declaring, “if this human being chooses correctly, then this entire creation will endure. But if this human being chooses badly, the heavens and the earth will disintegrate, and return to tohu vavohu, the primordial chaos.
In our generation, we have come face to face, at last, with the planetary implications of our life choices. In our insatiable appetite for energy, we have extracted coal and oil and gas from the earth, to burn, releasing the carbon of billions of fossilized trees back into our atmosphere. Through burning these fossil fuels, and by our production and disposal of non-biodegradable plastics, and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, we have poisoned our air, our water and our land and have caused the overall temperature of our planet to rise by more than one degree centigrade since pre-industrial times. It feels as though the question of the sixth day, posed at the dawn of the human race has been answered. We have made our choice, and have chosen death and destruction.
Tonight, as we welcome Shabbat and picture in our mind’s eye the world as it was at the beginning, I would ask that we re-open the question. We human beings are on a long journey, and we should begin by opening our eyes and by learning. The news is not all bad; even though it sometimes seems that way. In fact, there are important stories for us to learn, stories of hope and of promise for our future.
Nzambie Mattee is a thirty-year-old materials engineer living in Nairobe, Kenya. She is the founder of Gjenge Makers, which has developed a novel way of converting plastic waste into sustainable materials. She has created lightweight and low-cost bricks made of recycled plastic with sand—a material 5-7 times stronger than concrete. Her company has so far recycled 20 metric tons of plastic waste into bricks, producing between 1,000 and 1,500 bricks per day and has generated 112 jobs for garbage collectors, women and youth groups. At age twenty-nine the United Nations named her Young Champion of the Earth 2020, its highest environmental honor. Her story is not unique. Brilliant, passionate, creative problem solvers all over the world are standing up for all of us, declaring that our human story is not over. The question remains open.
Renewable energy is coming, fast. Look around our town, our country, and our world: people are driving electric vehicles. Marian and I both drive electric vehicles. Look at the houses on your street. Those are solar panels on the roofs. Ford is about to begin manufacture of its F-150 Lightning all-electric truck. Greenland has officially stopped all new oil and gas exploration. For years now, Rwanda has outlawed plastic bags. New Zealand is phasing out single use plastic. I know that these are small countries, but they are leading the way. At the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi last month, heads of state and environmental ministers from 175 nations committed to forging an internationally binding agreement to end plastic pollution by 2024.
I know about these things only because I asked Barbara Greenleaf and Jeff Young of our CBB ECO Team for some good news. Thank you Barbara and Jeff for flooding my inbox with good news! And by the way, our CBB ECO Team is looking to expand and to make more and more of an impact in our community. Let me know if you are interested and I will put you in touch with Barbara and Jeff.
One of the most important functions of the EcoTeam is to educate us, to expose us all to the good news. The bad news is easy to find, and it does not motivate me. The bad news depresses and immobilizes me. But give me a good story. Show me that young woman in Nairobi, who is warm, and charismatic and a born leader, and I am ready to do my part.
I am a rabbi. Not a scientist, and not a policy wonk. I will not be discovering the new technologies that will save this planet for our children and grandchildren. But I know who I trust. My brilliant friend, and fellow CBB member, Susan Rakov is the Director of the environmental policy organization The Frontier Group and Susan tells me that the tax credits that allowed Marian and me to receive a 30% tax credit when we installed our solar panels are going to go away in 2024, unless congress votes to continue it. That seems like a simple decision, at least to me.
I’m a rabbi. I teach Torah; I sit with people in times of grief and of joy, and I work with all of you to build community. I think I have learned something, over all of these years, about hope and fear, about courage and about overcoming paralysis. Here at CBB, we are in the emotion business, and I believe that on a fundamental level, the challenge of environmental action and responsibility is an emotional challenge.
Let me tell you a story. When we bought our house many years ago, Marian asked me to put up a clothesline, so that she could dry her laundry in the sun and the wind, as she did growing up in England. Few people in England have clothes dryers, even today. That clothesline was one of my very few successful construction projects, and ever since Marian has used it to hang out her laundry and our kids’ when they were growing up, and the household towels and linens. But for years I never used it for my laundry. I was so busy with my job that I felt I could not afford the time, so I would pop it in the dryer. About a month ago, for whatever reason, I did a load of wash and noticed that it was a beautiful day outside. A classic Santa Barbara day, sunny with a nice breeze. I went outside, with my damp laundry in a basket, and it took me exactly five minutes to hang out my entire load of wash. Those five minutes were a gift. Five minutes with the birds nearby and in the distance, and the fragrance of orange blossoms floating on the gentle breeze. It was a meditation. Two hours later, I went back to the clothesline and there was my laundry, bone dry and smelling of the sun and the wind.
Often, we can reduce our carbon footprint simply by taking a moment to slow down, to do something the old way…putting away our “labor saving” devices. To walk instead of to drive. A Shabbat free of meetings and of emails can be a day of rest, both for us and for the earth.
That decision to hang out my clothes to dry was one tiny decision. But two thousand years ago, a Jewish sage taught: mitzvah goreret mitzvah. One correct choice leads to another. And here I am tonight, sharing that decision with you. If even one or two of you choose to put up a clothesline, and especially if you do it with your child or grandchild, then who knows how far the ripples of that momentary decision will travel?
The question of the sixth day of creation is being answered every moment of our lives. Will we choose life and the blessing, or will we choose chaos and destruction? I pray that each of us is blessed with the strength, the wisdom and the courage to choose life, that we and our children may live.
Shabbat shalom.