Tisha B'Av

Get Dirty Fuels out of our Air & Water;
Get Dirty Money out of our Politics

At noon on Tuesday, July 20, there will be an interfaith gathering for lament, hope, and action on behalf of Mother Earth at Upper Senate Park on the Senate side of the United States Capitol in Washington.

Our basic demands: "Dirty Fuels Out of our Planet's Air & Water"; "Dirty Money Out of our Politics."

The date was chosen twice: a number of progressive and environmentalist organizations chose it because it is the third "monthiversary" of the Gulf oil blow-out, and in some providential or coincidental way, it is also Tisha B'Av, the traditional day for Jews to lament the Destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem 2000 and 2500 years ago -- and according to rabbinic teaching, the day when Mashiach (Messiah) was born. A moment when the wail of lament and the hopeful wailing of the newborn come together.

Today the sacred Temple of all peoples, all life-forms is the Earth itself.

The Shalom Center, working closely with Shomrei Adamah of Greater Washington, initiated the Jewish aspect of this effort, which has been endorsed and co-sponsored by Am Kolel and other Washington-area congregations and groups. The framework we will use (with modifications) for the vigil/ interfaith service/ action is a liturgy you can see on our Website here.

.Please let us know who and how many are coming from your community to Upper Senate Park by writing to us at LamentandHope@gmail.com, which is the email for Vinny Prell, staff coordinator for this effort. If you are planning to use or draw on this framework for your own event in your own region, either as a stand-alone event or integrated into your observance of Tisha B'Av, please let us know at Office@shalomctr.org

We will gather at a moment when the Senate will be struggling over whether or how to control the over-burning of fossil fuel that is bringing on climate crisis and endangering the web of life on Planet Earth.

We will mourn what is being destroyed and then move from grief to hope, from hope to action.

We will lament the disasters that we face, using the ancient wailing chant of Lamentations that Jews have used for millennia to mourn the destruction of the ancient temples in Jerusalem. cultures, all communities of faith and ethical commitment.

And then we will move from grief to hope. The very knowledge that disaster threatens our planet as a whole bears within it the seed of planetary community. We will sing the songs, chant the chants, recite together the Psalms that celebrate our great round home––the only home our human race can live in.

And we will call for action. We will face the Senate and call on them to take steps to heal our planet from the climate crisis we already live in -- and weave together the wonderfully varied, multicolored strands of human cultures and communities in this great effort that we can only do together.

We invite you to join in this interfaith affirmation––to pray not only with our voices but also with our arms and legs, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once taught could be real prayer.

During mid-July, the United States Senate will be struggling over whether to pass a bill to take the first baby steps toward capping emissions of heat trapping gases, toward ending our addiction to burning fossil fuels beyond what our planet can absorb, toward ending our subjugation to the drug lords of this addiction -- Big Oil, Big Coal.

The corporate drug lords will be bringing all the money and pressure that they can, to bear upon the Senate. So we need to bring the bodies, minds, hearts, spirits of the people.

We will join our voices to the grief voiced by the Earth in places like the Gulf Coast, amid the oil-soaked deaths of pelicans and the fisherfolk way of life; the West Virginia mountains, demolished in the search for coal; the Amazon forest, burned for a few years worth of producing hamburger; the glaciers melting amidst the shattered lives of polar bears, penguins, and the Inuit; the stricken fields of Central Africa, where drought has triggered starvation, civil war, and genocide.

Yet even these are only precursors to the deadly scorching of our entire planet.

May the Unity we sense in the world, the Unity we seek in the world, bring us together in sacred unity through all our sacred diversities of life-forms and communities.
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For books on eco-Judaism and eco-spirituality by Rabbi Arthur Waskow: Godwrestling — Round 2; Down-to-Earth Judaism; and Torah of the Earth -- click here for "Shouk Shalom,” our on-line bookstore.    Read more »

"It's an infusion of oil and gas unlike anything else that has ever been seen anywhere, certainly in human history," said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, the expedition leader. [NY Times June 9, 2010.]

For two brief video teachings that move from lamentation to hope -- how to connect the ancient wisdom of Judaism to active change -- see YouTube here. and here.

What can we do to prevent this disaster in the Gulf from becoming a model of disaster for all Earth?

My heart is drawn to the day Jews mourn the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem -- and after a day of grief, according to the ancient rabbis, are able to welcome the first stirrings of the birthing of Messiah, on that same disastrous day.

The day is called Tisha B'Av: the ninth day of the midsummer month of Av. On that day, Jews have traditionally chanted in a special mournful melody the Book of Lamentations --- in Hebrew named Eicha, for its opening word: "How lonely ... sits the city, once full of life, now desolate."

I want to suggest drawing on ancient midrash and our own good sense to see Tisha B'Av this summer as a framework for grief, vision, and action in regard to our Earth. First we will cite the ancient midrash, and then [see blue passages below] suggest some kinds of actions we might take.   Read more »

This is not an oil "spill" we are facing in the Gulf, the way water might spill from a dish or oil from a tanker -- a finite amount in the first place, and then we clean up.

This is more like piercing, penetrating, raping the deep-hidden places in the body of Mother Earth, a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, with such ultraviolence that Her very guts are pouring out, drenching and poisoning us.

But we can take this disaster as a teaching toward a Turning in our lives and action.
To that end, we will present some concrete proposals for action at the end of this essay.

But let us begin by assessing the depths of our distress.

Every morning brings us fresh outrageous news about BP's and Big Oil's obscenities in the Gulf oil eruption -- and the fawning of paid-for governmental toadies:

Using sex, drugs, and money to bribe officials in the first place to overlook unsafety -- so that for years, the Materials Management Service has allowed dozens of wells to be drilled into the Gulf without requiring the Oil companies to get the permits they were legally obligated to get.

Giving BP a pass to drill without even checking environmental standards, though BP was already guilty of hundreds of safety violations in other places and of deaths from its mismanagement of oil wells.

Lying about how much oil is pouring into the Gulf.

Keeping independent scientists from measuring it themselves.

Getting US government approval for new permits and bypassing environmental-impact assessments even weeks after the president announced there would be a moratorium on new permits (in the light of the BP blow-out).

The article that follows looks at four aspects of this disaster, and how to deal with it: (1) spiritual failings; (2) corrupt politics; (3) making policy choices; and (4)prayerful political action.

1. Spiritual Failings

First and most basic, there is a spiritual teaching of all traditions that the US government and global corporations have been systematically violating.

The gulf disaster is an issue of power and the Spirit, not technology. It is rooted in a spiritual disease. One passage of the Hebrew Scriptures -- Leviticus 25 and 26 -- and millennia of human experience describe this as refusing to let the earth have its Sabbath rest.   Read more »

The oil-well disaster on the Gulf Coast of the United States may seem utterly the product of modern technology. But there are many teachings in Torah about precisely the spiritual failings that give rise to such disasters. The Jewish community could now take those teachings far more seriously and act far more vigorously to prevent such disasters than it has so far.

Torah’s description of the earliest experience of the human race in the Garden of Eden affirms on the one hand that God has made overflowing bounty available to humanity in the earth’s abundance — and on the other, warns us not to gobble up all this abundance but to show self-restraint in what we eat. If we do gobble everything in sight, says the story, we lose the abundance: humanity must then toil with the sweat pouring down its face to wring barely enough to eat from an earth that grows mostly thorns and thistles.

Many other passages of tradition reinforce the lesson. Yet in our world today, the human race — led by giant corporations that try to wring every drop of abundance from the earth without any forethought for the future -- is bringing upon itself the disasters Torah warns against, through worship of the “afterthought gods (elohim acherim)" of greed and power.

The same voracious forces that sought to devour every drop of oil in the deepest levels of the Gulf have foiled strong Congressional action to reduce the voracious over-use of fossil fuels and with them, the emission of gases that heat the earth and bring on climate crisis -- drought, desertification, rising sea levels, the spread of tropical diseases into formerly temperate regions, the disruption of crops.

Only grass-roots energy can move Congress. So the Jewish community should unite in a campaign that calls out to ourselves and our leaders -- “GOD’S EARTH IS NOT FOR BURNING.”   Read more »