Sustainability and Higher
Rabbi Deborah Wechsler
You may have noticed that many years on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I am sick. If not the High Holidays, then usually by Sukkot or Simhat Torah I can’t talk, can’t stop sneezing, have swine flu, bronchitis or some other variety of germ that usually takes me until Thanksgiving to shake.
So this year I’m trying something different. I started eating better and exercising in hopes that a healthier lifestyle might keep me healthier for the holidays and beyond. I’ll let you know the success of the experiment at the end of the month. I know what you are thinking - that it will be a successful experiment either way. But I’m really hoping to avoid ebola and the bubonic plague this yontiff.
Two weeks in preparing one of these healthier meals and I decided to splurge and went to Whole Foods to buy fish. It was pay day so I knew that would cover the cost of fish there. I wanted to make this amazing Sea Bass with roasted red peppers and capers that I hadn’t made for a while. I walked up to the fish counter, took my number and waited my turn. The fishmonger asked for my order and when I asked for Sea Bass he told me that they didn’t have it. I thought I might wait to make the fish later in the week so I asked when they might be getting it in. We don’t carry it he said, it’s not sustainable seafood. He directed me instead to another white fish which only cost half a paycheck and made a delicious dinner as well.
The word sustain is from the Latin meaning to hold up and is one of the themes of Rosh Hashanah because this is the day when we look to what sustains us and we also look to see what we are doing that is not sustainable.
Back in 1987, the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined sustainability as “that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But the broad theme of sustainability is expressed and actualized in every corner of our world and every corner of our lives.
We see it from an environmental perspective as we worry about land use, energy consumption, water availability, and food sources. We see it from a fiscal perspective in the way we spend money as a nation and as individuals. We see it from a social perspective as we live lives in communities with crime and poverty, where the cycle of violence means that children are being sustained (if that) by government programs that are disappearing by the minute. We see it from a religious perspective as we raise a generation of children whose parents can not afford a day school education for all of their children, who are alienated or simply uninterested in Judaism, who feel that Judaism doesn’t speak to them. And we see it from a personal perspective as we live lives that are simply unsustainable – from the schedules that we keep, to the way we eat and take care of our bodies, to how we treat our spouses and children and families.
The principle of sustainability says that we must modify our behavior so that our actions might last beyond the present. At the very end of both the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services we recite the prayer Ha Yom. Its usually a favorite of everyone - its got a peppy tune, we’re happy that services are almost over, and its theology of celebrating the present is one that we can all embrace. In the last line of Ha Yom we ask God, hayom tit’michaynu be ymin tzidkekha, Sustain us with the power of your righteousness today.
Today we ask God for help in sustainability. We have learned so many lessons this year. So many that we thought were hard to learn but we realize we have not even begun to experience how difficult those lessons will turn out to be. How many things have we done this year that we simply will not be able to sustain?
Some answers are all too easy to give. Our government can not continue to function if 44% of our budget is financed by debt. It has become glaringly obvious this year that this is unsustainable. My minor fish inconvenience is what they call rich people’s problems. I can find another kind of fish to eat. But for the one billion people in the world who are poor, and for whom fish is their primary source of protein, fishless oceans by the year 2050 means yet another world crisis looming because of our unsustainable food practices.
However, it is all too easy to look externally and determine what others are doing that is not sustainable. The challenge is to look within ourselves and ask - what am I doing in my life that’s not sustainable? Can I really sustain the pace at which I’m living? How about the way I am treating my body? Or the absence of spirituality or ritual in my home? Will the way I am living help future generations provide for their own needs as well?
There is a well known Mishnah in Pirkei Avot. It is plastered on the walls of this synagogue and your children come home from school singing it, “Al shloshah devarim ha olam omed. By three things the world is sustained. Al ha torah, al ha avodah, ve al gemilut hasadim. By Torah, by worship, and by deeds of living kindness.”
As Jews we have three things that sustain us. Three categories of actions which sustain the world. Torah study, worship of God, and acts of loving kindness are considered foundational elements. Does the world really rest on these things? Maybe, maybe not. What the mishnah is trying to say is that from a traditional perspective a Jew is sustained by living a life with these three elements and that living without them would be unthinkable and unsustainable.
This is in keeping with what the world around us says. The larger world has come to the conclusion that sustainability is a worthy and important value. Even the United Nations thinks so, not that they have the best judgment nowadays.
But here’s my concern: we have become so focused on sustainability that just sustaining ourselves has become the highest goal. We stay in jobs we don’t like or that are stagnant because they sustain us and they work with our kids’ school schedules even though we no longer feel that we are growing and learning. We stay in social relationships because of habit rather than because they bring meaning and purpose to our lives. We keep doing the same things we have always done because it is easier, because it helps us “stand” in the language of Pirkei Avot, or because it helps us be sustained but only in the sense that they help us survive.
As Jews we have a tradition that encourages us to think beyond sustainability to what might come next. There needs to be a higher purpose, we need to dream beyond what can merely be held up.
When we are satisfied with sustainability we fail to strive for the next level, what the mishnah in Pirkei Avot calls kayam. There is another almost identical teaching that says as follows – al shloshah devarim ha olam kayam. By three things the world endures. Al ha emet, v’al ha din, ve al ha shalom. By truth, by justice and by peace. (Mishnah Avot 1:18)
Our tradition demonstrates its universal focus in this teaching. The world might be sustained by the particularistic actions of Torah study, worship, and acts of loving kindness. But what makes the world endure? How does humanity carry on and persist and live lives filled with both stability and permanent value? Through the more universal, more fundamental foundations of truth in speech, justice in the deeds and affairs of humankind, and peace as worthy of the highest sacrifice. (Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch commentary to Pirkei Avot)
There is almost no point in living sustainable lives if what we wish to sustain is not able to endure or not worth enduring. The omed, of the former teaching of sustainability and the kayam, of the latter teaching on endurance are complementary terms and complementary values. We want to live lives of sustainability - with jobs and relationships and schedules, and behaviors and commitments that can be maintained. But more importantly we want the higher values to be upheld. I don’t want to just get by my whole life. I want something more valuable, something more meaningful and that’s what the tradition wants for us as well.
Do we want the federal budget to be balanced? Sure, but if that’s all we want then we have failed miserably. We need to look beyond balance to where government is able to provide for the widow and the orphan, to give people opportunity and education. Do we want there to be sea bass in the ocean? Sure, but we also want to look beyond towards solving the problem of global hunger.
Its been a difficult year, lately it seems they have all been difficult years for one reason or another – the economy, the political landscape, social realities, personal situations. Kids still at home, kids back at home, unemployed, underemployed, parents in declining health, parents who have passed away, challenging relationships and lack of relationships. Sometimes it is all we can do to hold up, to stand and sustain ourselves from one day to the next.
Last year, Jonathan Safran Foer, the talented young writer who wrote Everything is Illuminated, published a book about food called Eating Animals. In it he tells a story about his grandmother who was running from the Nazis and at the very end of the war was taken in by a Russian farmer. “The man,” she said, “Saw my condition and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
Foer said to his grandmother: “He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it,” she said. “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?” the author asked, “because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.” She replied.
Her grandson was shocked, “But not even to save your life?”
She replied, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
Rosh Hashanah comes with a message and a question. The message - don’t get so caught up in the sustainability of our lives that we forget to hope and to dream. The question - what matters? This is the time to sit by ourselves, or with our spouses, or children and determine how can we bring meaning and purpose to our lives. And even if much of what we do in our lives must by nature be maintained so that we can sustain ourselves, by what do we want to be surrounded? Which values and meaning do we want to infuse in our lives. And then of course how do we go about bringing those values into action. What must be taken away to accommodate it? What new practices or rituals do we need to undertake?
Ha yom harat olam – today the world is pregnant, filled with possibility and potential. We pray for lives of sustenance and sustainability. But more than that we pray for lives lived with intention, where we strive for meaning, live lives that matter and move towards those things we dream about.
