GREENING SYNAGOGUES RESOURCES

Eco-counseling

There are times when even the most ecologically-oriented rabbi (or hazan, or pastoral counselor) will think not at all about the environment. It is fitting and proper that our attention at a given moment be focused entirely on the person before us -- their happiness, their pain, their situation, their prospects, their neshamah. Perhaps it is overreaching to even think about an ecological dimension to pastoral counseling.

And yet, if ecology is truly the “study of the house,” then nothing within the superstructure that is Judaism and that is life can be completely divorced from anything else, including the ‘big picture’ itself. Aware that in the moment, introducing such thoughts might be an unwelcome distraction, we nevertheless offer a few ecological reflections on pastoral work which might affect the caregiver, if not the congregant:

1. Loss is universal: Biologist Lewis Thomas writes in his 1974 The Lives of a Cell about the ‘vast mortality’ that underlies all existence, and contrasts the biotic reality with the human experience (p. 116): “We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. We send off for flowers, grieve, make ceremonies, scatter bones, unaware of the rest of the 3 [sic!] billion on the same schedule. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors… It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the formation that we all go down together, in the best of company.”

2. Life is beautiful: The sheer improbability of our existence should awaken in us wonder and gratitude, says Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, among others. That does not invalidate people’s real experiences of pain and loss and suffering; it does not even negate Hobbesian cynicism about life being “nasty, brutish, and short.” But it does suggest that we should appreciate the beauty while we can. Environmentalists like to sing Bill Staines’ folk classic, “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir,” the themes of which can be traced all the way back to Psalms 104 and 148, at least. Usually we cite such teachings to say that we who are too full of ourselves must leave space for the rest of Creation. But in working with folks who question life’s meaning or purpose or beauty, we can turn this logic around: just as all the rest of God’s creatures have their place in the chorus of praise, so do you; you are needed, and you are beloved, and you and your contributions are irreplaceable.

3. Perspective: Naturalist Annie Dillard writes in her 1974 classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the lowliest and smallest of creatures, and the incomprehensibility of how we come to be. For instance (pp. 169-70), “The barnacles encrusting a single half mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae… My point about rock barnacles is those million million larvae ‘in milky clouds’ and those shed flecks of skin. Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits. Can I fancy that a million million human infants are more real? What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles?” Likewise the biblical stalwart Job learns out of the whirlwind (chapters 38-42) that we are so infinitesimally small within the Divine universe as to essentially not count, and yet in the end, God looks after him, as everyone (per traditional theology). Perhaps Reb Simcha Bunim said it best, bidding people to carry two slips of paper with pithy verses on them, and to pull either one out of one pocket as needed in the moment. In one pocket we keep the saying “I am but dust and ashes;” in the other pocket we keep “the world was created for my sake.”