‘Deep calls to deep to the roar of your cataracts.’ Psalm 42:8
Yesterday, 8 June, was World Ocean Day. Time and again the Tenach, the Hebrew Bible, expresses wonder at the vast mystery of the oceans and the creatures who live in their depths. ‘Were you there when I made the earth?’ God challenges Job. Do you know who instructed the seas: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’ (Job 38:11) The seas have aways been a source of wonder, danger, might and beauty.
When I was a teacher, we took the whole primary school of two hundred children from Neasden and Harlesden to the coast so that none of them should grow up without ever having seen the sea. For those of us privileged to walk along the cliffs and beaches, the crashing tides battering the rocks below with their high spurting spume, and the song of the small waves as they draw shells and crabs and seaweed back into the tide, are as exhilarating and as mesmerising and as if the current was also within us, storming, cleansing and calming the mind.
Keats’ sonnet Bright Star is inspired by the mysteries of the ocean, as he hears
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.
But those waters sadly no longer offer such purity. Even in the remotest coasts of Scotland, I’ve seen bags and bottles, ropes and rubbish washed ashore in ugly heaps. Meanwhile, trawlers plough the ocean bed, ripping up everything, destroying seascapes and bio-domains as yet unexplored. Hence Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres’ urgent challenge: ‘Humanity can count on the ocean, but can the ocean count on us?’
That is why World Ocean Day is so important. On January 17th of this year, the Global Ocean Treaty was finally established. Ratified by over 60 countries, it is hopefully in the process of being implemented by the UK through the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill, which recently received Royal Assent. The treaty will enable the creation of vast sanctuaries covering as much as a third of the world’s seas.
It’s an opportunity to reimagine, says the UN website
The ocean has always flowed through us, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the climate that makes our lives possible. Now we are being called to reimagine that relationship. For the first time in a generation, humanity has chosen to govern a significant part of our shared ocean together.
In his masterly Ocean, Earth’s Last Wilderness, Sir David Attenborough references a key moment of such reimagination, when in 1970 Roger Payne first shared his recording of the songs of humpbacked whales, 90% of which had by then been slaughtered:
‘For the first 30 seconds there is mumbling and giggling as the audiences get used to the deep rumbling groans and high-pitched squeaks. But leave it longer and the audience would go totally silent as if in a trance.’
Listen to the whale song here:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sjkxUA041nM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
The songs transformed public attitudes, leading to a widespread ban on whale hunting. Today the deep seas hold many further mysteries, some of which we have glimpsed, and others of which remain as yet undiscovered. Maybe that is why, in a conclusion which has always puzzled me, Isaiah looked forward to the day ‘when the earth would be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.’ (11:9) Perhaps he was likening wonder at what the seas conceal to nothing less than awe before the divine. The Zohar, the Book of Splendour, likens the call of the deep-sea cataracts to the flow of sacred energy as it descends from the ineffable to give life to everything that is. (Tikkunei Zohar 39a)
Our family has a favourite shore, the rocks and beaches of Gairloch in the Highlands. I have stood there with Nicky and the children many times, staring west at the setting sun, listening to the fall of the waves, partly frightened, partly overwhelmed, and partly carried into another dimension, somewhere infinite and timeless, by the vastness of the ocean and the sparkling glory of the reddening light.
World Ocean Day Online
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ohcnAsXYPZY?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
– with EcoJudaism CEO Naomi Verber
https://unworldoceansday.org/calendar/the-ocean-gala-onboard-peace-boat-june-10