There’s a blessing, ‘Tread lightly on the face of the earth’. It translates into Jewish as: Go gently through God’s garden, because the Shechinah dwells among you.
The pictures I’ve been sent over these last weeks of flowers, sunsets and birds, the sound files of birdsong, and even the short film of members of our community isolating in Barbados trying to follow Kabbalat Shabbat while a troupe of monkeys determinedly distracts them, tell me that we do feel that the world is God’s garden. We may not use the word ‘God’, but we sense this is, could, and should be a beautiful, wondrous, holy place.
It’s five years since Pope Francis’ remarkable encyclical Laudato Si. It was published prior to the Paris climate conference; its fifth anniversary is being marked in time for COP 26, planned for this autumn but now postponed.
The Pope draws overwhelmingly on the Hebrew Bible to describe the relationship between humankind and the rest of the creation and, in particular, to make the connection between environmental and social justice which lies at the heart of his letter. Nowhere is this more evident in the Torah than in the closing chapters of Vayikra we read last Shabbat, which describe how we must treat the earth, our fellow human beings and all creatures.
The summary of Laudato Si outlines the tasks which are even more urgent now than at the time of writing:
I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle.
We personally, our synagogue building for certain, and perhaps this country, have rarely had so modest an environmental footprint as over the last two months. Now that we and the economy are beginning to be on the move again, the challenge is to keep it low. We cannot let this primary concern fall off our communal, national or international agenda. Talk of a ‘green recovery’ needs to be made real, starting with ourselves. What values have mattered to us in lockdown by which we are now determined to live? What didn’t we miss not having or doing? What did we appreciate, more than before?
I believe we’ve relearnt how much we love the world. We need to translate that into caring.