Keeping Hope Alive

We are in a moment - a time when it’s hard to feel that the earth below our feet is solid ground – a moment so intense, so portentous, so big, that it’s hard to find the right frame for it or the right words to use to describe it. Precarious might be the word that best describes my feelings these days. 

So many people I talk to are filled with fear, even dread, almost afraid to look at the news and at the same time unable to look away from it. The words I hear are “grief”, “despair”, “bereft”, just “sad”. 

We also find ourselves in the middle of Sukkot. A rabbinical student I know described it as, “a holiday where we are especially aware of human vulnerability in the face of our changing climate and our dependence on regular rainfall, the changing of the seasons, and healthy soil.” 

Finally, we’ve also just followed the Jewish calendar through Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. In other years, many of us leave these holidays with greater resolve to do better by the people in our lives and by the divine power that animates our lives. For many of us in the climate movement, we come away from the high holidays resolved to work more diligently on behalf of all life and our sacred mother, the Earth. 

How do we hold all these feelings? What can we do to express them? How, particularly, do we keep the wolf of despair from our door? How do we keep hope alive? 

My own antidote for despair is action, keeping my mind, my heart, and my body engaged in trying to fix the causes of despair. This is how I keep the flame of hope alive. 

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian sociologist famous for his quote that the medium is the message, less-famously also said, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” If there was ever an all-hands-on-deck moment, it’s this one. The good news… yes, there is good news, is that there are so many ways to work to confront the causes of our despair. Our small but mighty JCAN NYC offers multiple pathways for taking meaningful action in our city and in our state. Let me share one way you can take action right now; action that can literally help shape the future.  

My mantra for the past year has been “Election work is climate work”. While I won’t go so far as to say that HaShem heard me (though I wouldn’t rule it out either) a new, national, Jewish climate group called Dayenu: A Jewich Call to Climate Action appeared on the scene and kicked off Chutzpah 2020, a text banking (Tuesdays) and phone banking (Thursdays) campaign to invite the Jewish community to help elect politicians who see that we’re heading into the abyss of climate chaos and who are committed to take bold action on the day they are sworn into office. 

I want to encourage you to join me in this work. Yes, phone banking is uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it makes a difference when you help a person (or a hundred people) work through a voting plan, particularly in the face of all the efforts to discredit and sow doubt about this election's voting process. I also want to say that in this moment, please consider stretching outside your comfort zone – we need more people who will step into discomfort. This moment asks that of us all. If you’re intimidated by phone banking (and, again, please give it a shot), then sign up for text banking. I’m partnering with Dayenu to train new Chutzpah 2020 volunteers on the process of texting and calling and will make sure you are well trained and well supported. Sign up to volunteer for an event.

Yes, this is a moment unlike any other. Everything is on the line – the future is in fact on the line. Let’s all take meaningful action, stretch ourselves, push ourselves to do just a little bit more, and do it in community with people who are also trying to keep hope alive. Individually we are a drop, together we’re an ocean.

Jeff Levy-Lyons 

JCAN NYC Steering Committee Member

Expanding Our Circle of Concern

This past April, when NYC was the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, JCAN-NYC joined (virtually) the global environmental movement to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It was a bit hard to feel celebratory, but also a good time for the Jewish community to reflect on what environmentalists have been doing for the past 50 years and to help us reimagine our place in that work.

Of course, we happen to be living through a preview of the kinds of impacts that we’ve been warned will become more of the new normal if we fail to mitigate the worst effects of a warming planet. At the same time, we draw strength remembering all those who have celebrated 50 Earth Days with meaningful action. Those efforts haven’t been nearly enough, nor have they included sufficient numbers from the Jewish community, but they call to us to rededicate ourselves to this work.

I want to lift up the work of addressing environmental injustice, or climate justice as it’s more frequently called. Long before this virus came to our shores and hit our most vulnerable communities hardest, brown, black, and Hispanic communities had long been breathing bad air, living closest to polluting sites, and struggling to stay cool in heat islands. This is environmental injustice and the impacts are very real and paint an ominous picture of what lies ahead if the climate crisis unfolds unchecked.

These vulnerable communities need to be at the center of environmental work. As Jewish climate activists, who are predominantly white and likely privileged, this understanding will lead us to expand our circle of concern to these neighboring communities and build stronger alliances with them. We need to work on behalf of all humanity.

But I want to invite us to expand our circle of concern even wider. The celebration is called Earth Day, not People Day. It asks us to include all life and the planet itself in our work. As Jews, it asks us to be Shomrei adamah (guardians of the Earth), to remember and restore our reverence for the planet; to see it as a living dynamic being, having value far beyond what it can provide us; and to give it love and care for its own sake.

When we drain a wetland to build a strip mall, we are desecrating the planet and damaging its vital organs. When we cut down a forest, we are attacking the very tissues of our sacred home. These ecosystems support millions of species that are now dying out in staggering numbers. And, of course, when we extract and burn oil and gas, we are changing the delicate balance of our climate that makes life possible on Earth. However, when we see ourselves as being in some way deployed by the divine to do climate justice, we include and even center the Earth within our circle of concern. Science gives us the facts, but we need faith to be clear of purpose. We must marry the sacred and the secular, and that is the call to the Jewish people in this time of COVID-19 and climate change.

We now stand on the shoulders of those who have honored 50 Earth Days with the hard work of changing how we live on this planet. It’s our turn now. Rather than fighting against the world we don’t want, let’s create a vision of the world we do want, where all the creatures of the Earth, and the Earth itself, are held in our hearts with love, and we live in community with all life. Love and reverence can be the renewable energy, the regenerative power that will show us the way out of our current plight and create a real inheritance for all who come after us.

Jeff Levy-Lyons

Climate activist and member of Jewish Climate Action Network NYC Steering Committee