EVERY ending is a new beginning. This last month of summer vacation deposits us at the start of the new school year, and Rosh Hashanah.
What have we learned this summer, and this past year that can carry us forward into next?
I always like using stories to deliver the message, and here are three teaching moments of tikkun olam:
• A college grad is trying to explain modern life to a senior citizen: You grew up in a different world, he says, with no television, computers, jet planes, space travel, moon walks, nuclear energy, cell phones, digital photos, or computers. It was almost primitive!
The senior citizen agrees:
You’re right son. We didnt have all those things when I was growing up so we invented them. Now, what will you do for the next generation?
• An old fellow is walking on a beach littered with thousands of starfish when he sees a young woman coming his way, picking up every one she can find and flinging it back into the sea.
Why do you bother? he asks when he reaches her.
You’re not saving enough to make a difference. She picks up a starfish, throws it seaward, and says, I made a difference to that one.
Then she picks up another.
• At the Jews in Canoes camping weekend our synagogue takes every summer, a member asked me, With the environmental challenges so big, what can we possibly do to make a difference?
When Kol HaNeshamah started seven years ago, we threw all waste from our semachet and Shabbat potlucks in the garbage.
But over the course of 2004 we re-educated our congregation and our caterers, and the UCC church congregation with whom we share space, and all other users the pre-school, garden club, bingo nighters, etc.
TODAY, it feels uncomfortable for any of us not to recycle and compost. Weve reduced our organizations garbage by 80%.
And out in the wilds, where the state parks do not offer recycling or composting for campers, the Jews in Canoes collected and brought theirs back to Seattle for appropriate disposal.
Clearly, we can and have changed how we see our world, and how we act in it.
We can continue doing that.
Theres no reason we cant look at our gas, electric and water bills at home, school and work, and find ways to live more efficiently so we reduce our bills, carbon and ecological footprints.
The teaching moment illustrates the Talmudic principle (Sanhedrin 37a) that humans were created alone, to teach us that destroying a single soul is like destroying a complete world; and saving a single one is like preserving a complete world.
The first teaching moment illustrates our principle of dor ldor, passing our knowledge and traditions from generation to generation. It also aligns with the Native American teaching to look seven generations out before making a big decision now.
On the threshold of the new and unknown, we should be asking new questions, rather than charging ahead on old assumptions.
Our present world is not the only version of whats possible.
We are not entitled to having it stay this way or, however much we fight to keep it so. Our destiny is not manifest. While we can guess at whats coming, we never know til it arrives.
SO here are my answers to that congregants question, What can we do to make a difference?
• Dor ldor: Incorporate tikkun olam principles into your religious school education programs. Put your temple or synagogue on recycling and yard waste collection, teach your students to reducir, or make no waste, and theyll bring the ideas home and to school, so the adults can bring them to work.
Start and manage a garden, do a carbon and water footprint and of course, celebrate Tu bShevat and other nature holidays.
Use suggestions and source materials from Let The Earth Teach You Torah (Bernstein & Fink/Shomrei Adamah), The Judaic Roots of Ecology (Lillian Ross /Central Agency For Jewish Education, Miami), Easy Green (Westerman) and online sources.
• Follow Israels environmental example: drip irrigation, solar power, electric car networks, living buildings, waste reduction.
• Link your synagogue or temple to local sustainability organizations, national greening programs (such as those run by URJ, USCJ, Hazon and COEJL.
It is not up to us to save the earth; earth does a fine job of that on its own.
Its up to us to heal what we do on earth, so we can assure our own survival.
What can we do? Theres nothing we cant do. Lets take that fresh perspective into the new beginnings Rosh Ha-School Year and Rosh Hashanah offer us this fall.
L’shana tovah.
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