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An Inconvenient Truth - Yom Kippur Morning 5767, Oct. 2, 2006

About 2700 years before Al Gore, the prophet Amos preached another inconvenient truth that because the people of Judah spurned God’s teachings they inevitably would be consumed by fire; the people of Israel destroyed in battle for persecuting the poor and perverting sacred places with indecency. Long before Al Gore, the prophet Isaiah revealed to the people of Judah and Jerusalem the inconvenient truth that God was incensed with them for transforming the idyllic homeland into a den of idolatry. Long before Al Gore, the prophet Jeremiah exhorted and warned the people of the very inconvenient truth that they could not escape the march of the Babylonian empire; that exile from their homes and everything they knew was imminent.

Inconvenient truths are a tradition for us Jews. Yom Kippur is the time for inconvenient truths, the time to face up to the fact that we can no longer live as we have, that the standards that have been sufficient for us, are no longer sufficient, that the choices we have made have hurt other people, hurt our world, and hurt ourselves.

Like the prophet, the navi of old, whose job at times was to tell people that their choices were destroying their own lives and futures, so today, the day of ultimate judgement, is about hearing and facing our own inconvenient truths. This is the very reason the prophet we read about this afternoon is Jonah, who attempted to flee from the inconvenient job of telling the Ninevites that they needed to repent or be destroyed. Jonah, belatedly discovers it is impossible to escape from the job. God leaves him no room, just as there is no room for any of us to rationalize or obfuscate on Yom Kippur. Our job today is to face the truth, even if its inconvenient. The Hebrew word for inconvenient is ee-nuach, the opposite of nuach, the word for comfortable, settled, resting. What I am speaking about today is emet ee-nuach, a truth which is uncomfortable, inconvenient. It should shake us from our easy chair and wake us from our comfortable lives like a blast of the shofar.

Before viewing the film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” I didn’t know that Al Gore has been a champion of the cause of global warming for nearly three decades. Most of us only know climate change to be an issue of the last five, or perhaps, ten years.

Tragically, we are coming to know that we are the victims of a concerted disinformation campaign started in 1989 when a coalition of major corporate interests began organizing to cast doubt on the truth that human produced carbon dioxide was having catastrophic effects on the world’s delicate climate balance. These energy, automotive and industry leaders flouted the wisdom of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who once said, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Motivated purely for profit, these leaders produced their own truths. And unfortunately, we all bought into their convenient message, a message that wouldn’t require us any sacrifice or change, that kept us consuming as usual, and producing extraordinary wealth for their shareholders and their CEOs. But their message was far from the truth. In 2002, the Global Climate Coalition, as these pirates of industry called themselves, were able to disband because the Bush administration had become their mouthpiece and adopted their policies. Even as recently as January of 2006, the Federal government was attempting to silence Dr. James Hansen, Director of the US space agency’s Goddard Institute, who suggested the United States could take the lead on global climate change using existing technologies, wile he also warned that climate change would eventually leave the Earth “a different planet,” and said “we can’t let it go on another ten years like this.”

Silencing the truth was the modus operandi of our elected officials.

I want everyone here to be clear: no credible scientist today disputes the fact that the enormous droughts in the Great Plains and China, the melting of the polar ice caps and magnificent glaciers worldwide, and the increasing severity of hurricanes are due to the planetary climate shifts caused by carbon dioxide emissions produced by human beings. There is no debate among credible scientists that we already have the technologies to make it possible to reverse these trends before they reach the point of being self perpetuating and irreversible. Over the last few weeks, the White House seems to be warming up to admitting the inconvenient truth of climate change. But so far, its all talk and no legislation. It must concern each and every one of us who share a reverence for the life God gave us and the world God gave us to live in that there is still no significant Federal legislation or interventions of any kind addressing the fact that we Americans, who are but 4% of the world’s population, produce more than 25% of the planet’s greenhouse gases. We even produce two times the carbon dioxide as the average Western European who enjoys a similar standard of living.

Today, we are witnessing the sixth great planet-wide species extinction in the history of the world. Despite some contrived debate you may have heard it is not just a natural cycle of the earth’s doing. We’re doing it. We, 300 million Americans, are doing it. And I cannot begin to imagine what will happen when our students and competitors, a billion Chinese people, begin to catch up with us. Unless something changes, unless we Americans put the breaks on hard, we will have to face even more inconvenient and uncomfortable consequences that could render the planet uninhabitable for many of the 9 billion human residents.

I do not want to talk to you today about climate change as a politician, a scientist, or even as the eco-conscious citizen I am. I wish to talk to you about global warming as your rabbi. The earth is the home of every living being ever created. It is our home. The Israelites of old knew, like we do, that our homes can get sick. Our ancestors had a name for this sickness which could infect a house. They called it, like its companion skin ailment, tzaraat, leprosy. Our Sages intuited from the Torah that the health or sickness of a home was intimately connected to the moral health or sickness of the home’s inhabitants.

Even if you didn’t want to own up to your actions, your house would tell on you. Our home, planet Earth, is telling on us when eight of the ten hottest years on record occurred during the last ten years. Our home, planet Earth, is telling on us as Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, causing sea levels to rise, and threatening to flood 70% of the world’s population who live in coastal regions. Our home, planet Earth, is telling on us when just last year, an astounding 14% of the arctic ice melted, when in past years those percentages were in the single digits, 1%, 2%. The Torah strictly commands that one can’t continue to inhabit a home that is sick. Instead, we are commanded to remedy the causes for its illness. To work at making it liveable again, using everything we’ve got. Picture the devastation of New Orleans after Katrina on every continent and in dozens of coastal cities- New York, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Baltimore - hundreds of millions of ecological refugees, and the accompanying political and economic instability. Imagine our global food supply actually decreasing while at the same time we add another 3 billion people to the planet in the next fifty years. We will be both victims and perpetrators. You, your children, your grandchildren, victims of enormous suffering on a scale we cannot even imagine.

And each of us perpetrators too, because we have the tools to prevent the disasters now- plug in hybrid car technology, wind and solar power to harness, green construction technology- if only we have the political will and the personal commitment to see the job through to its end.

The earth is our home. We are commanded in the Torah to build a railing, a parapet, on the roofs of our homes. Why is the Torah so concerned with housing construction? Because without a parapet, someone might fall off our roof, and we would endanger the people living or visiting that home. By making the railing a mitzvah, the Torah rightly places the responsibility for the safety and well-being of anyone who might come into that home with the owner of the house. According to our faith, we play the part of the homeowners on God’s earth. Therefore, it is our moral responsibility to care for the safety and well-being of all the planet’s inhabitants.

I understand how difficult it is to feel personally connected to this issue. How in the heck can we possibly impact the nature and behavior of the very heavens, the earth and all that are contained in them? It’s a lot easier to be fatalistic and accept things the way they are. But Jewish tradition has never been and should not start now being a religion for fatalists. If you read Amos, without his editors, Amos merely said the end was near and inevitable. The story of Judea was reaching its fatal climax. Amos’ editors, just like Isaiah’s, insisted on something closer to a happy ending, a way out of total self -destruction.

I know how hard it is to realize and accept the fact that every time we fill our gas tanks, or turn on the heat in our houses, we are part of the or, perhaps, part of the solution. Its just easier not to think about it, just like we don’t think about the 2 billion people already living on less than $3 a day, or the AIDS ravaged African continent. You may remember Ed Begley Jr. from St Elsewhere, or more recently in his supporting role as Hiram on Six Feet Under. He is also an environmentalist and he once said, “I’m not driving a Prius because I love the planet. I drive a Prius because I love myself.” It may sound funny, but it isn’t. Today, as your rabbi, I am giving you permission to be selfish. Think about what is best for you, for your future, for your property values, for your beach house in Ocean City. Think about what is best for your children, your grandchildren. Do want to see our children and grandchildren forced to fight in wars to stabilize an increasingly unstable world?

For moral reasons and reasons of self interest, we have to put the pressure on our representatives in government to implement policies that will address how power is generated and how automobiles are manufactured, just to start. And we are also responsible for making individual decisions which have a contributing, cumulative effect in helping out in this crisis. In his book, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore tells the story of Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Gandhi was approached by a woman who was very concerned that her son was eating too much sugar, and was worried about his health. She asked Gandhi to tell the child about the harmful effects of sugar in the hope that he would listen and cease eating it. Gandhi was happy to assist, but asked the woman to return with her son in two weeks, not before. Two weeks passed and the woman and her son came to Gandhi. The sage spoke with the boy, and recommended that he stop eating sugar. The boy agreed, and the mother was extremely grateful. “But why,” she asked, “did you insist on the two week period of waiting?” “Because,” replied Gandhi, “I needed the two weeks to stop eating sugar myself.”

What are the ways we need to be the change we need in the world? If you have not seen it, return here on Oct 18th, and view Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, so you can learn the whole story and learn much more about what is happening to our planet. But on your seats, I have also given you today a list of ways you can immediately start to reduce your personal contribution to carbon pollution. Just remember, Judaism doesn’t only ask us to do what is readily within our reach. Only doing what was convenient got us where we are today, with effects that are going to last for centuries.

But the complete prophetic message, the one that includes the message of hope, is that teshuvah, turning back is possible. The course of history is not inevitable. We don’t have to be so slow to change that in the 11th hour, when we are teetering on the brink of disaster, we look back and say, its too late. Rather, let’s be like the Ninevites, to whom Jonah spoke, and who turned themselves around. What must Jonah have said to them to make them respond to him? Maybe they heard the hope in his words. Somehow they were able to see the way out. And God relented from the punishment he had promised.

Robert F. Kennedy’s prophetic words to the young people of South Africa on their Day of Affirmation in 1966 speak a similar hopeful message to us on this holy day. He said, “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a [person] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others ...he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, ..... those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of ... resistance.”

Inconvenient truths are a tradition for us Jews. Yom Kippur is the time for inconvenient truths. The time to face up to the fact that we can no longer live as we have, that the standards that have been sufficient for us, are no longer sufficient, that the choices we have made have hurt other people, hurt our world, and hurt ourselves. Now is the time for each of us to change a small portion of events, to stand up for an ideal. The choice is ours - yours and mine.

We can stay with business as usual until we destroy the nurturing climate of our planet, or we can be the generation that changes direction, that chooses life. The choice will be made by us, by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Kein Yehi Razoneinu. May it be our will and may God give us strength.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri