||. תורת ישראל – Halachic Tradition

The prophets help us ask radical questions about our society, to consider the previously unfathomable: Can we imagine a world without climate change? A world free of fossil fuels? A world free of environmental racism?

But on a daily, mundane level, how do we begin to live answers to these questions? This is where the power of the halachic tradition, honed over twenty-odd centuries, offers a path.

The halachic system translates grand statements into lived reality. The Talmud offers a master class in how to weigh different values, how to arbitrate between competing concerns. How do we create a just transition to clean energy? What portion of carbon reduction should America be responsible for, versus Russia, versus Somalia? What portion am I individually responsible for? How can I institute daily, repetitive reductions in my carbon footprint?

The Sages can help us with these questions, weighing economic considerations and moral culpability; reaching consensus while recording divergent views; enshrining moral behavior in daily ritual.

Indeed, the Sages considered early versions of these questions centuries ago.

The Tragedy of the Commons

To take one example: the Sages were familiar with the tragedy of the commons, the idea that an individual’s use of public resources causes negligible harm, but when countless individuals come together, the negligible harm adds up to profound destruction. If a shepherd overgrazes, it helps his flock. If all shepherds overgraze, the fields are destroyed for a generation.

The rabbis weigh different approaches to solving this problem. (We are here indebted to Rabbi Akiva Wolff’s excellent article on the tragedy of the commons, in which he presents some of the following sources.) One approach is “command-and-control”: the Mishna decrees, “One may not hollow out a space underneath the public domain” (Mishna Bava Batra 3:8). The halacha simply bans the offending activity – in this case, digging up public roads. Punishment from the court will result if you transgress. This is a powerful, perhaps libertarian approach – no one owns public space, so stay out of it.

However, people may try to get around a ban. The law does not incentivize them to feel responsibility, it merely threatens punishment.

In Tractate Bava Kama (Babylonian Talmud), the rabbis suggest an alternative, using not law, but story – a common feature of Talmudic argument. A farmer illegally dumps rocks from his field into the public roadway. A passerby condemns him for throwing rocks from “property that is not yours into property that is yours” (B. Kama 50b). The farmer, mystified, later is forced to sell his land. One day, walking by his old property, he trips over the rocks, and suddenly understands that the public roadway is the only property he has left.

This is a radically different understanding of the public domain: each of us owns a share of it, and each of us is therefore incentivized to take care of it. Private farms come and go – but public land can never be taken from you. Forget about laws, this is self-interest! If we destroy the environment around us, it will end up biting us in the back.

Ask yourself – if Fortune 500 companies each owned a “share” of the Pacific Ocean, would they allow the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to exist? If we saw the atmosphere not as ownerless, but collectively owned, how would it affect our carbon emissions?

Finally, consider smoking indoors: in the 1980s, R. Moshe Feinstein was asked if smokers in a study hall were required to stop smoking if the smoke bothered their classmates. Drawing on halachic literature of personal injury torts, he ruled that the smokers are causing direct damages, similar to shooting arrows into the air, and cannot hide behind the excuse that “everyone else is doing it.” You are still responsible for aggregate damage, R. Moshe rules.

In other words, even if the public domain is overrun by wrongdoers – hundreds of smokers, or polluters – it is up to individuals to act morally, even if the injustice continues whether or not you act morally. This is the moral yoke of halacha. (This approach also nods at the idea of using civil lawsuits – ideas of damages and personal injury -- to rein in polluters.)

Yet perhaps the public domain is owned by someone else altogether: “For the Land is Mine, for you are but strangers resident with Me,” God says in Leviticus 25:23. The Rabbis say that eating food without reciting a blessing is akin to stealing sacred property, for all the world is the Creator’s (Tosefta Brachot 4:1).

This is the final rabbinic argument, one that Jews and religious environmentalists uniquely offer the world: We don’t own the land. We are caretakers, guests, tenants on a planet owned by God. The public domain is the Creator’s, and we should start acting like it.