Dvar Torah on Parshat Bereishit (Genesis)

Many people are disturbed by a whole bunch of things about both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In the interest of brevity and good taste, I will not mention any of them. I will say, however, that what disturbs me the most about Trump is not all the truly awful stuff he says and does (that’s it, no more on that from me), but, rather this one thing: his denial of climate change. It is not only him; the entire Republican party, along with all kinds of people on the right, is playing the same dumb game of denying the dangerously obvious. They even use it as some kind of anti-Hillary and Obama talking point: there is ISIS, and Syria, and the economy, and you tell me the climate is our biggest problem? Are you serious?

Well, yes, we are. Climate change is so real, so obvious, and so potentially disastrous, that the position of the deniers is almost as hard to fathom as that of those who would deny the Holocaust, and, potentially, even more stupid and awful. The fact that our planet is fast becoming uninhabitable is real, and should focus the attention of every single one of us on figuring out how to save it.

Often I ask myself, What is wrong with these people? How can they not understand and pay attention to what science - the exact same science we trust when we get on an airplane or behind the wheel of a car, or when we visit the doctor or check into a hospital – is telling us? How can they be so blind to the scientific evidence, as well as our own lived experience of the past 50 years, and ignore this threat to our environment?

One of the explanations for this stubborn, willful blindness is rooted in religion. The argument seems to go like this: God would not let the world He created be destroyed. Man, puny man, does not have the ability to destroy His creation.  Sometimes God’s promise to Noah after the flood, to not repeat that apocalypse, is brought as proof of this theory.

I would like to look at a few verses in the opening portion of the Torah, Bereshit, and see how these claims by the climate change deniers stand up to the actual Biblical and Rabbinic material.

One of the most dramatic and interesting Rabbinic readings of the creation story is connected to the beginning of plant life. The Biblical text says: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, grasses yielding seed, and fruit trees yielding fruit, after its kind, whose seed is within it, after its kind….And the earth brought forth …trees yielding fruit.”  The Rabbis make a big deal out of the insignificant-seeming fact that when God commands the earth to produce vegetation, He asks for “fruit trees yielding fruit”, but when it actually happens, the text drops the first “fruit”, and says that the earth brought forth “trees yielding fruit”, and not “fruit trees yielding fruit.”  I know, it doesn’t seem like much, but the Rabbis are all over it. They tell us the following: When God asked the earth to bring forth fruit trees yielding fruit, that first “fruit” is unnecessary – if they yield fruit, they are obviously fruit trees. The first “fruit” is therefore understood as a command by God for the trees themselves to be fruit – for the branches and bark to be edible; a kind of perfect fruit tree, where every single bit of it is tasty, and nutritious.

But what happened? The earth disobeyed, skimped on God’s intention, and brought forth the trees we know – inedible (in most cases) wood, bark, and leaves, and edible fruit – “trees bearing fruit” and not, as God had commanded, trees which are themselves fruit,  bearing fruit. This failure is understood as a sin by the earth, one for which it would ultimately be punished.

Now, we all know, I guess, that the earth has no real free will; it did not really choose to come up short in the tasty-tree-producing department. What the story of the earth’s “sin” is telling us is that there is a gap between the perfect world envisioned by God, and the actual physical world in which we live – there is stuff in this world that is not tasty, not fruit, not edible. The world is less than perfect, less than what God had actually planned it to be, full of useless byproduct and waste material. 

Now, how God doesn’t get to have His way in this is a difficult question – we thought He was supposed to be omnipotent. What I think it means is that the physical world, being God’s creation, rather than God Himself, is flawed, imperfect, subject to failure and waste. The inedible bits of fruit trees teach us that the physical world is full of good stuff and bad, desired outcomes and failures, high hopes that are dashed and dreams that go unrealized – it’s not all peaches and cream.

With this in mind, it is clear that the earth is also subject to being damaged, harmed, and even destroyed. The same principle we learn from the “sin” of the fruit trees tells us that the earth is, ultimately, only an imperfect physical thing. As such,  you better believe that if you pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, raise its temperature, deplete the polar ice caps, etc., etc., there is absolutely no divine guarantee that somehow God’s creation will be OK anyway. God would have liked apple flavored leaves on the apple trees, and banana flavored leaves on which the bananas would grow, but He couldn’t make it happen; he was bound by physical law, by biology and botany, by science. He certainly can not, and will not, prevent Greenhouse Gases from doing what they do. That’s just science.

Just as God couldn’t force botany to work like magic, and produce all-edible trees, He can’t defeat the laws of chemistry, physics, and meteorology either. What we poison, will, in fact, be poisoned. What we ruin will, in fact, be ruined. If we choose to fail in our role as stewards of this really wonderful planet, it will be our failure.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix