Fires and False Prophets

BY NINA WOUK

Driving home from shul after breaking the Tisha B'Av fast last year, I turned on the car radio only to hear of the worst forest fire season on record. In Sumatra, Labrador, Kentucky, Siberia, British Columbia, Italy, California, Guatemala, Finland, Tennessee, New Mexico, Spain, Alaska—wherever forests existed, oxygen-producing trees were uncontrollably transforming into choking clouds of polluting particles, gushing tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Global warming was feeding itself, the world burning as the Temple once burned, and for much the same reason: the inevitable consequences of human acts.

Now it is Tisha B'Av again, the day that Jews traditionally fast, mourn the disasters of our history, and read lamentations. The original lamentation is the biblical book of Eichah, traditionally regarded as the prophet Jeremiah's account of the Babylonian army's besieging and burning Jerusalem and the First Temple.

One midrash pictures Jeremiah returning to dig through ruins for the dead, saying to them, "What can I do for you now? Didn't I warn you?" Another shows him in Babylon, having followed the enslaved exiled survivors. Finding them mourning, he says, "I swear, had you wept in Jerusalem, you would not have been exiled." The tales of this most unhappy prophet echo the theme "Too late, too late."

Rabbinic legend tells us that the people of Jerusalem rejected Jeremiah's call for a change of heart and action. They preferred to trust false prophets who promised that the forces of nature would submit to magic, protecting Jerusalem with walls of water and fire. It is no more surprising that these prophecies failed than it will be when global warming worsens despite the White House's attempt to justify inaction due to "incomplete scientific knowledge" of its causes. For us as for our ancestors, willful naïveté about the workings of nature remains a mortal danger.

As Jeremiah well knew, no change of heart or action can avert a process already set in motion. Even an immediate drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could not stop the world's temperature from climbing in the coming century before beginning to fall. Nevertheless, we, like our ancestors, can choose whether or not to worsen a bad situation. The first step towards change is a negative one: to stop, or at least limit, a dangerous course of action. However, confronting the many-headed monster of environmental devastation, we lack Jeremiah's certainty to as to which actions must be stopped, or how.

None of us can afford to waste our limited energy on unreal threats or unrealistic strategies. Activists must learn to distinguish true from false prophets. In our age, this means becoming scientifically literate enough to sort through the media-babble and identify real dangers and solutions. Science, as Richard Feynman once said, is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

An even greater task is to become accepted as prophets. Whether talking to politicians or to friends, environmental activists need to move beyond the fuzzy-headed tree-hugger image, which restricts credibility. We need to be able to name with confidence the evidence for global warming due to human activities. More than that, we need to be able to demonstrate workable means of changing; policies that have reduced emissions of greenhouse gasses, or supported sustainable agriculture and reforestation. Since global warming is a long-term process that may result in colder winters and greater snowfalls in some areas, we need to define success not as immediately lowered temperatures, but as the initiation of changes that may take generations to develop. Like the ancient prophets, we need to take, and encourage others to take, the long view.

As dangerous as false optimists are the purveyors of misplaced or exaggerated warnings. Activists can't afford to waste energy on battles against demonstrably unreal dangers, such as cell phones and electric blankets. Nor dare we reject evidence of even partial successes; with nothing to build on, all information reduces to a useless inducement to despair.

Jeremiah accepted that no one can change the results of processes long ago set in motion. Like him, we can and must find the roots of hope in that very impossibility, which shows the consistency of our universe. "God's kindness surely has not ended, nor are God's mercies exhausted," Jeremiah wrote. "They are new every morning." Rabbi Moshe Alshich interpreted this to mean that God renews human souls each day; each time we wake, we return to consciousness and to a consistent identity. Additionally, as the prayers before the morning Sh'ma assure us, God renews daily the work of creation, sustaining the sun, the moon and all the forces of nature. The constancies of physical law and of consciousness allow us to analyze the past, to plan for the future, to assess the consequences of our acts.

Combating the false prophets in the White House and the media will never be easy, nor is success guaranteed. But we are not permitted to despair or give in. The health and the very future of the planet we call home requires our action, and our voices.

The story of Purim itself, of course, our own story of rescue and liberation, stands like the overly serious guest at a party implicitly reminding us of other peoples and groups still struggling for their own survival, for their very lives.

They tried to kill us, we won; so let's eat, drink, put on crazy costumes, make fun of all that we hold dear, go wild! And while you're letting loose and chowing down, decide what you'll do, today, to help move our world from oppression and poverty to freedom and sustenance, and (in the words of the Megillah) "from suffering to rejoicing."