If we all help, there is hope for our planet

In honor of Earth Day and Passover, Jewish Rhode Island is sharing the following D’var Torah, which was given in Temple Emanu-El’s Minyan Chadash service.

I want to start today with a brief land acknowledgement: that we are here today on the ancestral lands of the Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.

I want to talk about Earth Day. It was on April 22nd, Erev Pesach. And I want to talk about the 10 plagues, since it’s Passover. But I’d like to start with a creation story.

In the book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she talks about a world “in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” She presents a Shenandoah oral tradition:

Skywoman falls down from Skyworld, and as she falls she is holding a bundle in her hand. This bundle, that she is clutching tightly in her hand, turns out to be branches, seeds and fruit from the Tree of Life. With the wise counsel and help of animals and with these seeds and fruit, she brings forth plants from the mound of earth on the turtle’s back, and from there we have our land, our Earth.

We can learn from this story as we seek to transform the way we relate to our Earth and alleviate the climate crisis.

The story stands in contrast to our creation stories. Eve and Adam are punished for eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Prior to that creation story, of Gan Eden, humankind is told by God to dominate the Earth. (B’reshit, 1:28)

The domination of our planet has certainly allowed us to be successful as a species in many ways, but it has led us to where we are now with the climate crisis. To heal the Earth, we have to learn to live in harmony with other beings and with the planet itself.

So let’s turn to the plagues. When I was planning this d’var, I told Rabbi Barry Dolinger about it, and he mentioned that the plagues can be thought of as examples of anti-Creation.

I’m not going to go through all 10 of them. But we can easily see how the plagues in Exodus can remind us of current environmental disasters – of destruction, not creation. When the water turns to blood, we can think of that as water pollution. Fish died then, and fish and other water creatures, such as coral, are dying now.

Hail pounding down can be seen as a super-storm. Frogs leaping out of the water can remind us of the way amphibians suffer so much with water pollution, leaping to our attention, with three legs and other deformities, and multiple extinctions.

And here I want to acknowledge some of the many sources I read that nourished this d’var: Shoshana Meira Friedman on Truah.org, Dominik Doehler on Zavit.org, and Prof. Ziony Zevit on thetorah.com.

I want to focus, though, on the first plague. First of all, after Aaron extends his rod to transform the waters to blood, the Egyptians then need to dig underground around the Nile to find safe drinking water.

Looking at this ancient story, I thought that if the water of the Nile had become unsafe to drink, poor people would have been hurt more than those with more means. There may have been people who relied on the fish as their main food source and didn’t have food stores. People might have lacked the resources to dig for safe water.

In our time we see these types of patterns. Environmental racism and inequity are real and profound.

And reading this plague led me to the word mikveh, which can be a collection of water but also has as its shoresh [root] the word for hope.

Let’s look at the language from the first plague:

“And God said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron: Take your rod and hold out your arm over the waters of Egypt – its rivers, its canals, its ponds, all its bodies (mikveh) of water – they may turn to blood.” (Sh’mot, 7:19)

In the book of Jeremiah, chapter 17 vs. 13, the word mikveh is used to refer to God, and God as the hope/mikveh of Israel is compared to a font of living waters. Again, mikveh has this association with a gathering of water, and we have hope.

And then, actually, if we go back to our creation story, we find this word mikveh as well:

“God called the dry land Earth and called the gathering (mikveh) of waters Seas. And God saw that this was good.” (B’reshit, 1:10)

Here we have the waters gathered into seas and this gathering is good, it is part of a creative endeavor; it is, in a way, the essence of hope.

There are plenty of actions we can take to transform our lives into ones of harmony with the Earth, to heal the planet. When I speak to people about this topic, I acknowledge that the climate crisis can lead us to a kind of paralysis, because the issue is so monumental.

But it can be manageable, we can do one thing at a time. No one of us can heal the Earth alone but we can accomplish a lot together. We can support COEJL, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, we can focus on local environmental legislation, we can move our energy use to sustainable sources with solar panels and biking – and much more. There are so many different things we can do!

But I want to go back to this text, to this common thread, that a word associated with hope was both in a plague story, about the Earth actually bleeding, and in a creation story, about the formation of the waters at the beginning. There is hope in these waters, there is still hope for our planet.

I want to close with a quote from Rabbi Rachel Berenblatt, who blogs as the “Velveteen Rabbi.” She cites Rabbi Shefa Gold and says, “The plagues can be understood as a kind of deadly imbalance, each ‘an aspect of the God-force that is broken off from the Tree [of Life].’ ... It behooves us ... to look closely at what patterns of our own may be creating and sustaining deadly imbalances in our own day.”

May we work to heal the Tree of Life and carry hope for the waters of our future.

JOANNA D. BROWN belongs to temples Emanu-El and Beth Sholom, in Providence. She is an adolescent medicine physician and lectures about climate change and health.