Spirit and Story Archive

A Joyous Connection with All that Lives

By Steven Greenberg

The planet is under siege, or so environmentalists tell us.   The forests of the world are being razed, threatening the planet’s biodiversity and jeopardizing the life-sustaining capacity of the atmosphere.  Global warming, caused by the depletion of rain forests and the burning of fossil fuels, is melting the earth’s ice caps and raising water levels, threatening massive flooding around the world.  The ozone layer is being depleted by chlorofluorocarbons, methyl bromide, and methyl chloroform that are released into the air by various industries.   Pesticides have contaminated our fresh waters and are beginning to undermine our seas.   Environmental scientists and attentive citizens are sounding the alarm about these threats, but most politicians and the public at large seem apathetic and seem to discount the magnitude of the threat.  Short-term thinking and a focus on what is close at hand in space collude to keep us from attending to problems that are global in nature and require that we take the long view.  The costs of inaction today, we are told, will be nothing less than disastrous tomorrow or the day after.     

This is the language of ecology today.   It is a rhetoric of complaint and dread, a moralizing harangue that cries out against our self-indulgent consumption and our shortsighted self-destructiveness.  The thrust of this rhetoric is negative and it seeks to motivate action by engendering fear and anxiety. And yet, while fear can motivate us to act, it does so effectively only when the dangers that threaten us are experienced as real and immediate.  Accordingly, those who would urge us to act from fear must persuade us that the danger we face is indeed present and pressing.  But the efficacy of such fear-inducing rhetoric is quite limited in the case of the environmental threat because environmental science does not typically indicate that we will personally suffer from our continued inaction.  Rather it is our children or more certainly our grandchildren – or the children or grandchildren of someone living in a far corner of the globe – who will bear the consequences of our failure to act. The danger to the present generation is apparently minimal.  Consequently, those who employ the rhetoric of fear are drawn to exaggerate the present danger, hoping that the fear they induce thereby will increase our propensity to act on behalf of the environment.  

I found myself thinking about all of this last Friday while attending Hoshana Rabba services at the Carlebach Synagogue on 79^th Street in Manhattan, where two hundred people packed tightly into the tiny sanctuary for a service that lasted from 10:00 am till 3:00 pm.  Hoshana Rabba is the last day of prayer and supplication in the month of prayer that begins on Rosh Hashana.  Because it is not a full-fledged biblical holiday, there is no prohibition on using electricity or playing musical instruments.  The lulav and etrog are waved in the midst of psalms of praise and thanksgiving that are sung exuberantly to an instrumental accompaniment.   

Hoshana Rabba comes at the end of the holiday of Sukkot, a holiday whose rituals and themes are rich with ecological significance.  On Sukkot we are commanded to dwell in temporary huts that remind us of life’s fragility, that teach us that our safety is not secured by buildings but by the depth of our relationships and by our trust in the protective canopy or the heavens that can be seen through the roof of the sukkah.  On the holiday we join four plant species together and worship with them for the week, waving and shaking them in a choreographed fashion in prayers of thanksgiving and in petitions for God’s love and care.     

During Hoshana Rabba this year, I had an experience that awakened me to planet Earth in a new way.  The prayer service that day includes a common prayer recited on all Sabbaths and holidays:  “The soul of every living being shall bless your Name, Lord our God.”  I have said this prayer countless times before, but this day something extraordinary happened.  This time the words of the prayer carried me to a vantage point from which I was able to see the planet differently than I ever had before.   

“Were our mouth as full of song as the sea, and our tongue as full of joyous singing as the myriad of waves, and our lips as full of praise as the breadth of the heavens, and our eyes as brilliant as the sun and the moon, and our hands as outspread as eagles of the sky and our feet as swift as deer—we still could not thank you enough….” 

The words, the music, the voices, the palm fronds and citrons, all combined to deliver me to place where I felt the most incredible exultation.  The psalmist perceives the waves of the oceans, the celestial bodies in the heavens, the eagles in flight and the sprinting deer as living embodiments of exultant praise.    Carried aloft by the words of the prayer, the limits of my body dissolved as I became an eagle in flight, looking down upon the earth with the eyes of the moon, and hearing the crash of waves upon the shore as the ocean’s song of praise – I experienced all the cosmos as exultant before God. 

At that moment, from that standpoint, the prayer’s words of praise felt neither forced nor imposed as tribute to an egotistical god.  Instead, for me, they expressed the utter rapture of existence aware of itself in its manifold oneness.  At once it was clear to me that the animal world is not further from, but closer to, God.  It is only human beings who can fall out of sync with the natural harmony of earth and waters and sky.    

Late in the Hoshana Rabba service, there comes a moment in which all the congregation waves palm fronds in unison. In that instant it seemed as if my lulav had become an extension of my body and the minyan was transformed into trees dancing together in a storm. At the end of the service, an ancient prayer for rain is recited, accompanied by the beating of willows upon the ground.  Caught up in the power of the ritual, I became a willow tree in the midst of a rainstorm, lashing my branches against the earth, inaugurating a year of plentiful rain.   

Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav was once asked whether it is preferable to pray in a synagogue or in a field of grass.  He responded that it is better to pray in a field of grass because, whereas in a synagogue one might be spiritually connected to a few of the people with whom one is praying, one who prays in a field of grass is sure to be connected to every blade of grass whose very existence is an expression of prayer.     

Reflecting on my Hoshana Rabba encounter with the exultant and prayerful depths of nature, it seems to me that what is missing in the rhetoric and sensibility of the environmental movement is this very sense of the exultant and prayerful existence of the earthly.   Might it not be that what opens us up to our connection with all the life on the planet is not fear, but joy and praise?  Disconnected from Gaia and her music, our healing cannot proceed. A positive environmentalism must be rooted in the pleasure that comes from an ecstatic and imaginative reconnection with the whole of nature.    

Our fears for the planet are well founded, and the dangers that threaten it surely demand our attention.  The usual jeremiads clearly have an important role to play in waking people to these dangers. But if we want to engage people’s best energies, we must also strive to awaken them to a soulful reconnection with the earth. To this end, we must invite our fellow earthlings to join with us to dance as  dizzily as whirling dervishes in the unity of it all. This is what is most needed if we want to fuel our efforts to restore our planet, our home.    

(Rabbi Steve Greenberg will be scholar-in-residence at the Pre-Ride Shabbaton (at Camp Sprout Lake near Poughkeepsie, NY, October 11-12, 2002) of this year's New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride, in which 140 riders from across the denominational spectrum (from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated) will ride over 100 miles in two days to raise environmental awareness in the Jewish community.  The bike ride is a project of HAZON. For more information see www.hazon.org or info@hazon.org.)

To read additional articles by Steven Greenberg, click here. 

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