ROSH HASHANAH:

by Rabbi Zoë Klein
Rosh Hashanah 5764 / September 2003

Lavender Eucalyptus
Tree moss opium
laurel mint rose
Irish Springs
Dead Sea Salts
Indian Gardenia
And 52 gallons of bath water
(Which started as snowmelt
in the High Sierras
traveling over a thousand miles[1]
born of a chrome faucet
Into two capfuls of
Grapefruit jasmine
liquid bubbles
Terrycloth
Tile
Green tea bath beads
Sandalwood bath gel
Ivory Cream non-slip bath mat)
This
is the natural habitat
Of the North American
Rubber Duck.
The embryonic stage
Of the Rubber Duck
Is intriguing
In that unlike most animals
It begins its life
As a plant
(As you know
From the song about the ant,
The rubber plant
And his high hopes)
In the pungent soil
Of the Amazon rain forest.
Discoverers
distributed the Rubber Duck seedlings
To farms
Where the trees are
Pared and stripped.
Their latex fluid shipped
Hundreds of miles
To autoclaves
A far cry from the rain forests…
Which bodes very well for the Rubber Duck species,
Since 25 million acres of rain forest
are destroyed every year
25-50 acres cut every minute
of your waking or sleeping life.
So any time you’re feeling low
’stead of letting go
just remember that ant
Oops there goes another…
( -- 3,500 acres of rain forests
since we’ve been worshipping here
wildlife habitat
wet flowers and painted insects
with medicinal properties
God only knows
leveled and shipped to be processed
at the air polluting
river waste spewing
Rubber-Duck-factory --)
…plant.
Remarkably, there is also
a mutant subspecies of Rubber Duck
That’s petroleum-based,
oil…
It is a wonder of science:
The highly mysterious Rubber Duck,
(Which incidentally,
Doesn’t quack, but squeaks
like a carbon-based mouse)
has never been recorded eating anything
and yet,
How much it consumes,
That sticky substance out of which it’s born,
The United States consumes
its entire weight in oil every week,
drilling through pristine systems.
The same year the world’s tallest skyscrapers fell
the world’s largest floating oil rig sank off Brazil,
in Ecuador more oil has leaked
into the ground
than in the Exxon Valdez disaster
the whole land reeking of oil,
large black drops forming
on vegetables when it rains,
when Saddam Hussein ordered
700 Kuwaiti oil wells
to be set on fire
he became history’s most uncontrolled
experiment on the effects of air pollution,
black clouds still hovering ominously
over Arabia, chemicals fusing
in ways scientists could never imagine
The Gulf war, truly a war against the gulf,
500 miles of coastline awash in oil,
From above
NASA photographed
A poisonous paisley of black and blue swirls
Tens of billions of gallons on water and land
rosy hued shorebirds drawn
by ancient memories from Africa
pausing in the fragrant marshes
and inter-tidal flats,
feathers glued,
nostrils clogged,
searing bright eyes
entombed in asphalt
We are squandering millions of years of fossil wealth
in a geological moment.[2]
During a storm
In 1992
A giant crate
filled with thousands of Rubber Ducks
upon a container ship
fell overboard,
and for 11 years,
these thousands of Duckies
have sailed the world’s oceans
and any day now they are expected to wash up
on the coast of New England.[3]
And what of our marine cradle,
How is the sea faring?
If there is anyone to tell us
Rubber Ducky,
You’re the one.
Having bobbed over
humpback whales
Sharks on their way to the
Santa Monica pier
Leafy tresses of kelp sprawled over the sea
Forty mile drift nets sweeping through the sea
Taking everything in its path
From targeted tuna
To fragile jellyfish
Turtles whales,
Mega trawlers scraping entire ecosystems
Acoustic fish finders,
Nuclear waste,
Nerve gas disposal sites,
Plastic debris,
Pesticides,
Herbicide,
Fertilizer run off
From millions of acres of farmlands,
Sewage sludge,
the living network of microorganisms
that shape the basic ingredients of the ocean’s living soup
Growing up we never ate tilapia,
All of a sudden
Everyone is serving tilapia,
Any time that happens in the market,
It is because another
Commercially valued fish species
Has been nearly wiped out,
The stocks depleted,
Chilean Sea Bass it endangered,
So you only see it plated
At weddings and fundraisers.
I am pretty sure in the Book of Revelation
there is something written like
“The face of Armageddon is tilapia.
” And I believe there is a verse
In that same chapter:
“When bottled water appears, the end is near.”
And also:
“Ionic air purifiers are the precursors of doom.”
From the haunted reefs where Dodo’s roamed
To the Pearl Islands where Survivor is filmed
Finally washing up
In a foaming froth
Tinged a mucus green,
here ends the migration of the Rubber Duck
quite a journey from the Amazon
to Sesame Street.
In the Duck’s 11 year journey
How the world changed.
Millions of acres gone,
Hundreds of our fellow species
Become extinct every month,
45,000 people die of starvation every day
Add it up and
We are destroying our marble
With its beautiful swirling
cloud-swept atmosphere
Like a slow-hitting meteor.
Why talk about it?
What does war and cancer
And disease and dis-ease
And loneliness and A.D.D.
Suicide bombings
And anger management
And clinical depression and autism
And Israel
And all the stuff we care about
Have to do with the environment?
Researchers studying urban decay
Conducted a simple study.
They took a Jaguar
Put it in the South Bronx
Then they ducked
And watched.
Four days nothing happened.
Then they broke a little window
on the side of the car,
and within an hour
It was turned upside down,
Torched,
stripped.
They did the same with
An apartment building
Broke a window on the side.
Soon graffiti appeared,
Dealers started hanging around,
Prostitutes appeared,
The building decayed,
Tenants moved out
Crime moved in.
Our window is broken.
A frozen lake
Just under our feet
With a long crack in it,
Our environment is a glass house
And we won’t stop throwing stones,
Our window is the environment,
Window into our past, future,
Into ourselves,
Into the soul of the universe,
Into God,
And it is shattering.
And it’s right there,
We don’t even see it,
Because of the drone of motors,
Air conditioners and climate control that mask seasons,
Lights that mask the night,
We don’t see it…
We don’t even see it,
We are not connected to it at all any more
Except through nature preserves and pets.
We have no connection to the sensuous surroundings,
and shivering entities.
We don’t even see it.
The environment is the broken window
We look but we only see ourselves,
Locked in our mirrored cities,
People dying in Iraq every day
In this war,
Every month,
In Israel,
The recall circus,
Premier week,
If you come to Friday night services,
You know,
We talk about current events all year,
If something strikes you in the news,
Don’t wait for High Holidays
Come to Friday night services,
Be with a loving community
But this is big picture time.
The environment is the broken window
That we have not been talking about
And no one wants to see or fix.
And yet, it is the reason for it all…
we can hardly be surprised
by the amount of epidemic illness
in our culture,
widespread psychological distress,
suicides,
household killings, mass murders.
We are as sick as we make the world around us,
No less.
We are violent by nature
Because we are violent with nature
We are violent with nature
And it is making us sick.
When Cain murdered Abel,
His blood cried out to God from the ground,
And God cursed Cain from the ground.
What did Cain do?
He built a city,
He could no longer work the land,
It would not yield to him,
So he built a city,
And legend says that because
Abel’s blood cursed the ground,
The trees which once each produced
all kinds of fruit,
now each only bears one kind.
It is an amazing legend,
For it faults man’s violence
For diminishing nature’s bounty.
The first city was built
By a man with the blood
of his brother on his hands
that bloody fingerprint
in every concrete city.
The breathing ground is corrupted,
The earth is a broken window,
And this whole city of graffiti and violence
Is built upon it.
It is an American problem,
We are beastly
The way we consume resources
And the pollution we contribute to the world,
It is shameful.
The rabbis say of the character Lavan,
Whose name means “white”
that the only thing pure about him was his name,
And we have a President
The only thing environmental about him
Is his name
Pillaging fragile ecospheres
As if they harbor terrorists
It is an American problem
And it is about religion,
And it belongs on this Rosh Hashanah
Which is also Shabbat
Which is the birthday of the world
the beginning of creation
And simultaneously Shabbat, its end.
In many oral cultures
On the outskirts of the community
Lives the shaman,
Never living in the people’s midst,
Never too deep into the woods,
Separate from the people,
Straddling the line between the tundra of nature
And the habitat of man,
He is the window between the two.
The people are a little afraid of him.
They often wonder if he is causing
The very ailments he heals.
Western culture sees the shaman
As a magician,
His potions, dances, sleight-of-hand, and spells.
But what we think of as magic
Is actually a keen understanding of the natural,[4]
We have magicians in our history,
Honi the circle Maker
In the first century
Could make it rain,
Elijah the prophet
Had power over rain and ravens and fire.
Moses drew water from a rock
And had power
Over seas like the Red
Rivers like the Nile.
And volcanoes like Sinai.
Abracadabra
Is from ancient Hebrew
Abara, I create
C’dibra, as I speak.
Abara C’dibra
I create as I speak.
It is interesting
That Judaism
With all of its tomes of literature and law,
Has always considered itself an Oral culture.
We’ve held onto that pretty fiercely,
Abracadabra
I create as I speak,
The magic of the spoken word,
Though Talmud was written by the year 450,
It is always referred to as the Oral Law.
Abara c’dibra
I create as I speak.
The world was created by Godspeak,
Vayehi Or.
Let there be light.
Written language used to converse
With the land,
Pictographs mimicking
The cursive script of birds,
And the sinuous calligraphy of lightning.[5]
Abara c’kitba
I create as I write.
Even Hebrew
has pictures associated with it,
Connecting it to the larger
More-than-human world.
The word for the first letter, alef,
Means ox,
And is in the shape of an ox,
The word for the second letter bet,
Means house
And is in the shape of a house
And gimmel means camel.
Greek scribes took on these letters,
Alpha beta gamma
and the names for the letters lost their meaning,
alpha didn’t mean ox, it meant nothing.
No longer connected to the natural sphere.
Scholars say that is when man
Stopped conversing with nature.
Around the time of the new alphabet
Arose philosophies:
Socrates said
“I’m a lover of learning
but trees and open country won’t teach me anything
whereas men in the town do.”[6]
Written language
Allows us to eternalize concepts,
Giving rise to Plato’s
Assertion
That things, table, cloud
could be pondered as eternal, ideas,
unchanging forms.
The meandering river now had less to teach
Than the eternal written concept of river.
Ideas became more important than things,
Ideas are eternal, like souls.
Things decay and die, like the body.
Thus grew the Greek belief
That souls are more important than the body,
The soul is imprisoned in the body
That the body is basically an anatomized corpse.
And with this complete separation
From the natural world,
By necessity,
Christianity created an unnatural Heaven,
A place above and beyond this world,
Completely denying
The belief of oral cultures in
the gradual reintegration
of one’s ancestors and elders
into the living landscape
from which all too are born.
Cultures in which
Loved ones were cremated
to return to the swirling air,
Or fed to the condors and mountain lions
Or our own,
Rejoined with the ground.
In Christianity, heaven is supernatural,
originating in the loss of our
ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth,[7]
It is a rejection of nature.
But for the Ancient Hebrews,
Eternity was not in a separated heaven,
but in the promise of a future reconciliation on the earth.
A return to the Garden.
Our swords beat into plowshares.
The oldest form of afterlife-belief in Judaism
Resurrection, is really the belief
In the precious unity of body and soul
There is no Judeo-Christian world.
Judaism was founded by a shepherd
Christianity was founded by a carpenter.
We are an agricultural religion.
An oral culture, storytellers,
Judaism is the shaman of the world,
Sometimes feared by the society,
Standing on the edge between oral and written,
Nature and civilization,
And we forget the nature part,
We forgot how agricultural we are,[8]
But you only need consider
Our holidays,
Rosh Hashanah always falls on the new moon,
Look to the sky tonight
And you’ll see the tiny sliver
And the first night of Sukkot
There is always a full moon,
As we sit in our booths
With the stars
Shimmering through the eaves,
Nature participating in our festival
As we read on that day
Ecclesiastes,
To every thing there is a season
And a time to every purpose under heaven,
And we shake the lulav and the etrog
Like shamans in an ecstatic dance
Tu B’Shevat
Is our festival of trees,[9]
On Passover
We celebrate Spring
And read from the Song of Songs
Arise my love my fair one
And come away
for lo the winter is past,
flowers appear…
let us go down to the vineyards
to see if the vines have budded
there I will give you my love
More and more young people
Seem to be looking to the religions of the far east,
Peaceful, meditative, natural nurturing religions, they say,
Zen, Buddhism,
And it makes me crazy,
Because that is Judaism,
But it’s as if we’ve totally forgotten,
It is a religion of the land,
The sages studied in the kerem bavel,
The vineyards of Babylon
Where the rabbis would walk with their students
And expound under the trees,
Outside of the brick and mortar of the cities,
Deborah under her date palm,[10]
Shabbat ends only when
You go outside and count three stars in the sky,
That means in LA
It never ends,
We have blessings for rain,
And blessings for dew
That we say every day,
Blessings for thunder,
Lightning,
rainbows,
Birkat hachama
Is an astronomical blessing over the sun
We say only once every 28 years,
Torah is filled with
Instructions protecting the land,
Do not trim a fruit tree until its third year of produce
So that it may grow strong,
Every seventh year, let the land rest
From your plows and tilling,
That it may regenerate.
There are days that
Celebrate the almond blossom’s first blooming,
The majority of our laws concerning tzedakka
Are based on agriculture,
Torah says
Every year set aside a tenth of your crop,
Do not harvest the corners of your field,
Do not go over your trees a second time,
But leave what remains for the poor,
The orphaned, and the widow.
Do not destroy trees in a time of war.
People say, look at this native American Prayer shawl,
Warp of sun, weft of moon,
We have that,
That’s a tallit,
Psalm 104 says
You are clothed in glory and majesty,
wrapped in a robe of light.
You spread the heavens like a tent cloth.
You make the clouds of your chariot
move on the wings of the wind.
When you wear a tallit
You bear the wings of a stork,
Wrapped in a robe of sunrise,
Heavens spread around you.[11]
The menorah is patterned
after the olive tree
Torah is a tree of life,[12]
We are the shaman of the world,
We are the window,
Because we stand,
Our alphabet stands as the point
Between
Animistic and machine
Abracadabra is ancient Hebrew,
I create as I speak
Oral, magic
I cast a spell as I spell
And we’ve forgotten this,
Hebrew word for Spirit and Wind is the same Ruach
The Hebrew word for soul is neshama
Like the Navajo expression for soul “the wind within one”,
Some say that the reason the Hebrew alphabet
Has no written vowels
Is because vowels are sounded breath,
Which is sounded soul
And you cannot make a visible likeness of the Divine
The Sages write that the vowels are to consonants
As the spirit is to the body
And that to speak
is to breathe life into a lumps of clay
Abara C’Dibra
To breath words, worlds, to life.
The Hasidim employ
Breathing techniques
In prayer,[13]
Yehudah HaLevi would begin his prayer sessions
by calling upon the winds to come
from all four directions
and fill his breath
and instructs his companions
to circulate the air inhaled
from all four directions
interchangeably with their bodies.
One Hasidic reads:
If prayer is pure and untainted
Surely that holy breath
That rises from your lips
Will join with the breath of heaven
That is always flowing
Into you from above
Thus that part of God
Which is within you
Is reunited with its source.
Kol Hanshema tehallel ya
Let every breath praise you,
What are we,
After all,
But intensified sky?[14]
Ecologist David Abram wrote:
“Given the importance
placed upon the wind and the breath
within the Hebrew tradition,
we may be tempted to wonder
whether…
the monotheism of Abraham
and his descendants
was borne by a new way of
experiencing the invisible air,
a new sense of the unity
of this unseen presence
that flows not just within us
but between all things,
granting us life and speech
even as it moves
the swaying grasses
and the gathering clouds.
Is it possible that a volatile power
once propitiated as a local storm god
came to be generalized by one tribe
of nomadic herders
into the capricious power
of the encompassing atmosphere itself?
We know that the singular mystery
revered by the children of Abraham
was an ineffable power
that could not be localized
in any visible phenomenon,
could not be imaged in any idol.”[15]
The name of God
Which all Jews refuse to say,
Choosing to replace it with the word Adonai,
Probably reads something more like
YHWH
Some kabbalists say the forgotten pronunciation
may have been YH
on the whispered inbreath and WH
on the whispered outbreath,
the whole name of God thus
formed by a single cycle of the breath.
The awesome mystery
of God’s name not separate
from the mystery of breathing.
The Shofar on our holiest day
Is a grand celebration of breath,
Soul, God, air,
There are two things we must do
1. Reclaim our religion for what it is,
Recognize our place as the shamans of the world,
Last year I ordained all of you rabbis,
This year you shall be shamans,
And,
2. We have to fix the broken window
We are an agricultural religion,
Deeply rooted in the earth
And the seasons,
We have to remember that
Return to that,
Look through our adult education brochure:
Dr. Eitan Fishbane Mystical Insights from Hasidic Masters
Make Your Own Tallit with Naomi Katz
Count Your Blessings with Flori Hendron
My People’s Prayer with Elaine Diamond
Zohar with Pinchas Giller
Meditation with Rabbi Fox
We have our Teva programs,
Mammoth, Moguls and Meditations, Isaiah’s 3rd Annual Ski weekend,
Family Camp, A Weekend in Malibu
Shavuot Revelation Hike
Escape to the Sea Kayaking for Passover
We have to remember what this religion is,
And then we have to take it to heart
And fix the window.
How do we do that?
Temple Isaiah has a Green Team,
And as members of California Interfaith Power and Light
We’ve helped with the passage
of landmark climate change legislation
in California last year
talk to members of the Green Team
for great advice on books to read,
and action to take,
Think about the Air,
Practice Air-Care,
Because if Abram is right,
That the monotheism Abraham discovered
was a new way of experiencing air,
Then the air is our God,
The air is God,
Does God exist?
Breathe,
Yes,
to pollute it
Is to suffocate God,
And suffocate ourselves,
Think about how we pollute the air,
In your companies,
In your homes,
Fuel efficiency of automobiles
Is the biggest step we can take
To reduce the threat to global warming,
And the ozone
Which allows more and more
cancer causing radiation into our atmosphere,
Consider this when you buy a new car
That the conscientious car you drive
Can stop cancer,
And if you must drive a vehicle
That goes any less than ten miles per gallon
Of earth’s blood,
At least use that vehicle
To transport food to shelters,
Offer to pick up all the stuff
Whenever we have a clothing or toy drive
At the Temple.
Earn the fuel you use.
Conserve energy,
Because when you conserve energy
You prevent wars,
Depression,
Suicides,
The world’s population is out of control,
6 billion,
next generation 8 billion,
Our growth much more bacterial
than primate,
Exceeding the biomass
by as much as hundred times
of any animal species that ever existed here
Zero population growth would help,
But I could never say don’t have children,
We are a life affirming religion,
Full of hope,
But at least make concentrated effort to
Introduce your children to nature,
Pay membership at aquariums that research and educate,
Don’t run inside when it rains,
Give them a love of nature
And you give them connection,
For one who walks in nature,
No matter how desolate,
is never alone,
is clutched by gravity,
Bathed in air,
In dialogue with the breathing earth,
Give your children passion for the environment,
Because only in nature
Do we understand living powerfully in the present,
In the bristling moment,
Spiced with danger and wonder
At Tashlich tomorrow
When we gather at the ocean’s hem,
Listen to the sound
That has not ceased since the creation of the world,
Swim in it,
Beg forgiveness,
Don’t just throw the crumbs of your sins
For it to sweep away
With so many other pollutants
We’ve dumped into her,
Make you peace with her,
Make your promise to her,
The Mother Ocean,
Cradle of life.
Promise her that you will
Change the way you live.
Live lightly and your life will be light.
Turn off lights,
Become vegetarian
Protest the mechanized
slaughter of millions of God’s creatures
with life’s breath in their lungs
become vegetarian
and save water,
it takes 2,500 gallons of water
to produce a pound of beef,
and 25 to produce a pound of wheat.
The amount of grain that we feed to our cattle
In America
Could itself sustain 80% of the world.
Eat green, not only because you care about animals,
Eat green to save the lives of 60 million people
Who starve to death every year.
If not vegetarian,
Become eco-kosher,
In other words,
Buy foods that have been produced
In an ecologically conscious way.
Download what fish populations
Are endangered
And put the list in your wallet
And resist eating them
Or serving them at your weddings.
Practice Baal Tashchit,
The commandment not to waste.
John F Kennedy said:
“We chose to go to the moon, it is now time
to reach for the sun.”
More energy from the sun hits the earth in one day
Than all conventional oil
That has ever been used of ever will be used.
The Galapagos Islands are turning solar,
Iceland is becoming the first Hydrogen society,
Energy from water,
There are renewable sources of energy.
Invest in them and be a hero,
To tigers butterflies rivers oaks me and the rest
Of the breathing world.
When you add onto your houses,
Consider solar power
And you will be heroic.
If you redo your kitchen
Make sure the refrigerator is not in direct sunlight.
Consider Green energy, such as solar or wind,
Clean energy.
Make sure your air conditioner is in the shade.
Clean the coils of your refrigerator.
A new refrigerator
Reduces carbon dioxide
By 3,000 pounds a year.
Try to manage with only one refrigerator.
Recycle the old.
Several programs in California
Buy back refrigerators,
Picking them up from your house
And paying you.
Recycle everything.
The motto of ecologists is
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
And to these three,
As Jews, we add on a fourth,
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Remember.
Remember that we are the stewards of this earth.
25% of all mammals,
20% of reptiles,
25% of amphibians,
and 34% of fish
are all threatened with extinction.
Join the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life,
Coejl.
Look at their website,
Coejl.org
For ways to add your voice,
For suggestions,
Actions you can take,
Learn and support.
Use ceiling fans.
Carpool.
Vote for people who have a stand on the environment.
Remember that the land doesn’t belong to us
We belong to the land.
We have four more years until
The next Sabbatical year
On the Jewish calendar.
In those four years,
Let’s prepare to let the land rest.
Americans consume about 25 acres
Of land per person over a life,
Whereas non-Americans average 2.5
The planet is exhausted.
If we were to develop the world to be like us,
We would need four planet earths.
Yes, we are great,
Our scientific and technological advances,
the spread of democracy
and human rights throughout the world.
But we also bring with us
Decimation to the natural environment
with cheerful abandon.
We accelerate the erasure
of entire ecosystems
and the extinction of thousands
of million-year-old species.
We are an economy driven society.
Economists focus on production and consumption
But in an economy driven paradise,
The environment will have crumbled,
And we are nothing but
anatomized corpses in this paradise
Reduce reuse recycle and remember,
We are not angelic beings that descended here,
We evolved here,
That is the essence of environmentalism
Remember Leviticus 25:23
The land is Mine
And you are My tenants.
Reduce reuse recycle and remember
The air,
Remember the water,
Remember the earth
Every time you take a breath
You are saying God’s name.
Remember
Every Rosh Hashana
There is a new moon in the sky,
Shema
Listen to the world speak,
The language of
The stone that fits snugly in your hand.
Read the pattern on a tortoise’s shell.
Remember the air,
Remember the air and
Remember your soul,
The wind within you,
The intensified sky,
You are the shamans of the world,
Plant yourself,
Hear the music of the seasons,
Wave your hand
With a spear of lulav
And golden etrog,
The eyes of your eyes shall see,
The ears of your ears shall know,
Abara C’Dibra,
Heal this place,
And as God lives and breathes,
you shall be healed.
Abara C’dibra,
I create as I speak,
Abara C’dibra,
Heal this place
And as the Earth lives and breathes,
We shall be healed.
Abara C’dibra,
Heal this world
And as the Earth loves and breathes,
We shall be healed.