Why aren't we angry?

In September 2002, days after Tony Blair put over Britain's spurious case for war against Iraq, somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 people marched in protest through the streets of London. Over the coming months across the world demonstrations of similar sizes protested against a war that offended a wide range of members of the public. As we know, the US and UK dived into war regardless, dragging other nations behind them and the ratings of Blair and Bush eventually suffered a terminal decline.

In 2009, hundreds of thousands of people took part in The Wave in London, a march to show a desire to move towards a sustainable economy. It was a tremendously good-natured affair, a living expression of contemporary environmentalism's enforced social agenda of being hopeful and not giving in to negativity. It was a protest of sorts - a positive "We're ready for change" kind of protest. It wasn't direct action protest and it wasn't angry.

But why not? Why are so many people happy to rage about a war that cost hundreds of thousands of local civilian lives in order to secure future oil supply but aren't happy to rage about the war on the earth that has the potential to cost billions of lives over the centuries?

The question comes to my mind as my daughter, Zafra, grows. Now 18 months old, I pray she will live to a happy old age. Yet as I consider this I also consider the words of an elderly  congregant of mine - "I'm glad I won't be alive to see the things that you'll see." She understood. The environmental legacy that we pass onto the next generation becomes more and morelikely to become horrific with each day of inaction. If Zafra lives to see the end of the century, I shudder to consider what she might see and that makes me angry.

I look at the failure of the COP talks that essentially locks us into a minimum of 2 degrees of global heating, with the potential of much more, especially considering the possibility of runaway feedback effects, and I think, "You are potentially harming my child. You are potentially exposing her to horrors and hardship that you could have prevented."

Perhaps one of the differences between the war in Iraq and anthropogenic climate change is that we - the average civilians - didn't cause any of the deaths in Iraq whereas while we continue as excessive consumers, we are at least partly responsible for anthropogenic climate change. Putting pressure on government is important but focussing all criticism on government is misplaced. Some of the anger should be aimed towards ourselves for our own hypocrisy.

But there is a place for angry challenge. Not shop-smashing challenge (if for no other reason that to repair violent damage uses yet more precious global resources), not rioting, but actually unifying as a mass of people and saying to the political parties, "Unless you take this much more seriously than you currently do, you will not win the next election." Putting environment before the economy should be a political win, not a loss, and the reason that it isn't is because of us, the voting public and our inability to expressanger.

We limit ourselves, but hardly. We say "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but what we really do is "reduce costs, buy cheaper reused products and recycle, recycle, recycle" as though recycling alone will somehow avoid dangerous climate change. We limit ourselves but only as a meagre contribution. "Is this the fast that I have chosen?" says Isaiah (58:5). In other words, this is it? That's pathetic! Isaiah is angry at the tokenism of the masses and the leadership who influence them.

Maybe it's time to reignite some of that anger, that passion, and say, "We will not tolerate this. We must all do better. No ifs, buts or maybes. No more excuses." Well-focussed anger, dissatisfaction at the status quo, is surely what we need to kick-start the dramatic changes that our society needs. Let's generate that anger and focus it properly.... and soon.

Tu Bishvat - a reflection

Only when the last tree has been cut down;

Only when the last river has been poisoned;

Only when the last fish has been caught;

Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

This Cree Indian maxim comes to my mind after having last night watched the film The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel. In that film, social order has broken down entirely as the biosphere essentially collapses. Amongst other things, all the trees have died and throughout the film the thudding of another dead tree as it falls to the ground echoes in the distance. It is a chilling vision.

But it won’t happen to us, right? Well, strictly speaking it won’t… even if we can’t limit global heating to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius (which is looking harder and harder for every year of pontificating and posturing at Climate Change summits), it seems almost impossible for the biosphere itself to die. And yet the idea that social order could collapse is not as impossible. There is increasing realisation that our society now is “nine meals from anarchy” – after three days of lack of food, it seems that most people will do anything to make sure that they and their loved ones can eat.

But it won’t happen to us, right? Well, not as such. Even with positive feedback loops starting to kick in, toppling the millennia-held climate stability upon which our civilisation was based, we’re still unlikely to witness social breakdown in our lifetimes. Instead, it is the inheritance that we seem to want to give to our children, grandchildren or perhaps great-grandchildren. Rabbi Charles Middleburgh writes “our children might forgive our silence and apathy on environmentalism, but our great-grandchildren will curse us for our selfishness…” [MANNA 94, Winter 2007, p.22]. If we continue to think in the short-term, it won’t happen to us, no. But if we live from the perspective of “us” being our extended family through the generations then, yes, unless we all make significant changes now, it will happen to us.

Today is Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees. I find it hard to celebrate this year. Yes, there’s the glory and beauty of every tree in the garden and local parks but the crashing of the millions of trees globally that fall to provide people with land, palm oil, coffee and more just echoes through my soul today. Maybe today for Tu Bishvat as well as singing happy songs about how lovely trees are, we should remember the thought from Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer - when a tree is cut down, its cry rings from one end of the world to the other, though no sound is heard. Maybe it’s time to hear the sound so we can help more trees, and future us, live together in harmony.

Jews, Christmas and Chanukah

When I was a young boy, I had a big sack with a picture of Santa on and my name engraved on it. Every year I would help prepare and decorate the Christmas cake – the picture you see here is me helping prepare it, aged 5. Our family would have a giant tree which we would decorate and when we woke on December 25^th, my Santa sack would be absolutely full of presents, usually a mixture of books and Transformers.

Into my early teenage years the presents would come until one year in September or October I asked my Mum why we kept Christmas since, after all, we were a Jewish family. I was told that it was a parenting decision that had been made so that we didn’t feel left out at school. It’s a decision I can respect even if 60% of the pupils at my school at the time were Jewish. My parents didn’t want us to feel different or, specifically, for our difference to lead to any sense of exclusion.

I explained that I understood that reasoning but now that we had all grown up, why were we still celebrating Christmas? The answer was that it was a family tradition. That was an answer I wasn’t so keen on and so I broke with the family tradition and said that that year I wanted no Christmas presents - if the family insisted on giving presents, they could be at Chanukah. And so our family developed Chanumas. I would get Chanukah presents, my sisters would get Christmas presents and it would all be called Chanumas. That made me no happier either. Finally, I said that since my birthday was in December, I could get presents for my birthday and if people wanted to buy presents at any other time, they could do it for Purim, which is when Jews traditionally give presents anyway.

In his book Liberal Judaism, Eugene Borowitz specifically addresses the issue of Jews celebrating Christmas, describing it as an “offense against the Christian faith. A large number of Christians properly resent having a major holiday of their religion subverted by commerce and sentimentality, and, not infrequently, by our contemporary paganism.” When I first read these words perhaps ten years ago, I knew they were right. How would I feel if a non-Jew told me that they and their family were celebrating Pesach by cutting down a living tree, eating matzah for a day, and spending ridiculous amounts of money on toys and presents for children? I would probably be enraged. I would tell them not to make a mockery out of my religion and not to make it so crass with their consumerist cravings. 

My first response when I was younger – just move the present-giving to Chanukah – is just as problematic, because it turns a festival about light, hope and overcoming adversity (and, for adults, the challenges of religious extremism) into a festival like-Christmas-just-Jewish. In fact, it’s not even like-Christmas-just-Jewish, it’s more like-a-consumerist-pastiche-of-Christmas-just-Jewish – not very attractive at all. Sure, play with a dreidl, use gelt, have a bit of a flutter, but that’s a teaching tool for nes gadol hayah sham – “a great miracle happened there.” Having a new present every day for Chanukah doesn’t teach anything – it’s just aping a mockery of another religion’s festival. So many times in the past I’ve said and heard the phrase “We don’t need Christmas because we have eight days of presents” that I’m amazed that we don’t stop and reflect on what we’re saying – we lost Chanukah and we promoted the Christians’ loss of Christmas to the great market. The forces of secular consumerism claimed Chanukah and Christmas as their own because we allowed and encouraged them.

But why? Borowitz again – “That many Jews nonetheless are avid to be part of Christmas testifies to some deep need within them…. What they long for is an end to being different. They are tired of being outsiders. They want to be included, even if the expressions of goodwill are superficial and trite.” My mother was right – it was about not being different. But I want to be different, we should all want to be different. Do we really all want to be virtually identical consumer drones who flock annually to shopping centres to buy tat that is only going to be replaced in a few years but another “must buy” item of disturbingly similar but slightly advanced characteristics? Are we so afraid of being called Scrooge if we actually think that the consumerist Christmas and Chanukah are disturbed reflections of a sick society that we dare not say anything and just go with the flow? Of course, December 25^th is a day when few people are at work so it’s a chance for a family day together. Everyone should relish that. But there’s a very big difference between a Jewish family that uses that time for everyone to get together for a big meal and a Jewish family that uses that time for crackers, turkey, tinsel, decorated trees and presents “because that’s what everyone else does.”

Interfaith families are, of course, different. But how many interfaith families truly show their children Christmas in church and Chanukah in synagogue? Anyone who says they have a tree and do presents because one of the partners is a Christian is not only kidding themselves but also their children and is also perpetuating the notion that religion is really equitable with consumerism. So, interfaith family or not, I would like to suggest that it’s about time Jews were more honest with themselves. Carrying on a religious family tradition is incredibly important so long as that tradition actually has religious merit. If it’s just shopping pretending to be religious, or paganism masking as monotheism (as in the case of a tree) that’s not only dangerous but insulting.

Ultimately, celebrating religious festivals is one way to step outside the mainstream society and to live with God. If a Christian family wants to give presents and then suggest why this reminds them of those who attended the manger and how they brought presents and then use that as a springboard for teaching about Christianity, I have no problem with that. Similarly, if Jews use Chanukah gelt to teach about Chanukah, fine. But Jews being consumers pretending to be Christians, that’s just shallow and sad.

Mind the Gap

Seemingly, in today’s world, it is not only possible but perhaps almost socially required for people to be applauded globally for creating something so horrific that it will commit half the species on earth to extinction and threaten the future of human society as we know it. It is seemingly the done thing to applaud those who dabble in what environmentalist Aubrey Meyer calls the “economics of genocide.”

I’m talking about the outcome of the COP talks in Durban that just closed with the agreement to talk about ways to reduce carbon emissions in nearly a decade’s time. Not a commitment to actually do something practical in terms of reducing carbon emissions, but a commitment to talk about committing to do something. If mass death weren’t the projected outcome of this, it would be almost comical. But since that it the projected outcome, it isn’t funny at all.

There is a pervasive social view that so long as we reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 then everything will be hunky dory and we’ll hold the global heating effect (not warming, it won’t be cosy) to within 2°C. With that amount of warming, it is generally held that while there will be serious social ramifications, human society will survive, albeit modified. The problem with that pervasive view is that it’s nonsense. Imagine the atmosphere is a balloon and every minute you put in 10 breaths of air. Imagine also that you plan by five minutes’ time to have reduced the number of breaths you put in by 60% - from 10 to 4. After five minutes, how many times have you breathed into the balloon? The answer depends on when you reduced the number of breaths. If you did it immediately, from the very first minute, then it would be 4x5 = 20 breaths, something a balloon could handle. But if you waited until the very last minute it could be (10x4)+4 = 44 breaths. Your balloon would have burst.

Delaying immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions allows these gases to accumulate in the atmosphere, so they build up. It’s a cumulative effect. So now we have an Emissions Gap – the gap between the emissions reductions that are needed and those that are being pledged. It’s a gap in carbon accounting, basically, that seems like an economics exercise but is, in fact, playing with peoples' lives. The Emissions Gap is now huge. If we accept the agreement made in Durban, then instead of trying to hold back 2 degrees of warming, we’re probably looking at 4 degrees, enough to kill millions of people, alter human society forever and render around 50% of global species extinct. This isn’t alarmist, this is what we know best on tested models. Even scarier, these models are conservative in their estimates because they don’t take feedback mechanisms into account that could destabilise the entire climatic system.

And what’s the front page on the newspapers? Either news about the Euro or news about a girl-band winning X-Factor. Sometimes when I look in the Reality Gap – the gap between what most people in society think is important and what really is important - I think we probably deserve what’s coming to us. The horrifying truth, though, is that the thousands upon thousands of impoverished people in the world who will now die from famine and drought in the coming hundred years, didn’t deserve it. Their future suffering is something we have now essentially locked into place. Still, so long as we don’t leave our TVs on standby after the X-Factor, it’ll all be okay, right?

What to do with leftover food?

As I wrote an article for a forthcoming book by UNESCO, I was reminded of a fascinating extract from Talmud that is worth sharing:

Grain being dumped into the open sea

“Some of the good things which Rav Chuna used to do: Every Shabbat eve he would send a messenger to the market who would buy up all the perishable vegetables which the gardeners had been unable to sell. These would then be thrown into the river. “Surely he should have given them to the poor?” [it is asked]. “No,” came the rejoinder, “they would then get used to getting it free and would not come to buy in the future.” “Perhaps he should feed them to the animals?” “It seems that Rav Chuna holds that it is not permissible to feed food fit for human consumption to animals.” “Perhaps he should not have bought them at all?” “No – if nobody would pay them, then the gardeners would produce less in the future.””

Why does Rav Chuna behave this way? Our natural inclination is obviously to give the food to those who are needy, but Talmud expects this response and explains that doing so traps people into a cycle of dependency. In today's society, using the basic models of supply and demand, grain is dumped into the sea in order to reduce supply and therefore maintain high prices. If the grain were instead given away, the price would slump and those producing the grain would not continue to do so (the third argument given by the Talmudic passage above). At least give it to the animals, then! Talmud says no - human food does not go to animals.

What can this passage teach us? It teaches us that the concept of bal tashchit, which I have mentioned before - the commandment to not waste anything - is very much a market-based concept. If it were not, then Rav Chuna would obviously be chided for wasting so much food. Bal tashchit must mean "unnecessary wastage." So in what way is this wastage necessary? It's extraordinary to think about, but it's necessary because without it the market would collapse and then no-one would get their food (since very few people own enough land to grow their own crops and rely on them). The market has to maintain a minimum price and sometimes food has to be dumped to maintain that price.

This is extremely challenging emotionally. In the short-term it might help the starving to dump food on them but in the long-term it locks them into poverty. Rav Chuna's actions are in one sense completely unsustainable and, in another, completely sustainable. Perhaps the answer is to create a more sustianable market but to do that the market first has to realise that it is unsustainable, and that recognition is very hard to foster.